USB Faq's

 

 

USB INTRODUCTION

Just about any computer that you buy today comes with one or more Universal Serial Bus connectors on the back. These USB connectors let you attach everything from mouse to printers to your computer quickly and easily. The operating system supports USB as well, so the installation of the device drivers is quick and easy, too. Compared to other ways of connecting devices to your computer (including parallel ports, serial ports and special cards that you install inside the computer's case), USB devices are incredibly simple!

What is USB?


         Anyone who has been around computers for more than two or three years knows the problem that the Universal Serial Bus is trying to solve -- in the past, connecting devices to computers has been a real headache!

  • Printers connected to parallel printer ports, and most computers only came with one. Things like Zip drives, which need a high-speed connection into the computer, would use the parallel port as well, often with limited success and not much speed.

     

  • Modems used the serial port, but so did some printers and a variety of other things like Palm Pilots and digital cameras. Most computers have at most two serial ports, and they are very slow in most cases.

     

  • Devices that needed faster connections came with their own cards, which had to fit in a card slot inside the computer's case. Unfortunately, the number of card slots is limited and you needed a Ph.D. to install the software for some of the cards.

        The goal of USB is to end all of these headaches. The Universal Serial Bus gives you a single, standardized, easy-to-use way to connect up to 127 devices to a computer.

Just about every peripheral made now comes in a USB version. A sample list of USB devices that you can buy today includes:

  • Printers

  • Scanners

  • Mice

  • Joysticks

  • Flight yokes

  • Digital cameras

  • Web cams

  • Scientific data acquisition devices

  • Modems

  • Speakers

  • Telephones

  • Video phones

  • Storage devices such as Zip drives

  • Network connections

        Connecting a USB device to a computer is simple -- you find the USB connector on the back of your machine and plug the USB connector into it.

      If it is a new device, the operating system auto-detects it and asks for the driver disk. If the device has already been installed, the computer activates it and starts talking to it. USB devices can be connected and disconnected at any time.

          Many USB devices come with their own built-in cable, and the cable has an "A" connection on it. If not, then the device has a socket on it that accepts a USB "B" connector.

 

The USB standard uses "A" and "B" connectors to avoid confusion:

  • "A" connectors head "upstream" toward the computer.

  • "B" connectors head "downstream" and connect to individual devices.

By using different connectors on the upstream and downstream end, it is impossible to ever get confused.

           if you connect any USB cable's "B" connector into a device, you know that it will work. Similarly, you can plug any "A" connector into any "A" socket and know that it will work.

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