Having covered the Motherboard, CPU and Memory as basic components of a computer, let’s see what else is in there.

Ports. For the purpose of the physical parts of a computer (also known as hardware) a port is a specialized outlet physically attached to the motherboard, whether directly or through a bus. What’s a bus? This you don’t want to miss 🙂 .

In the electric field, generally speaking a bus is a connection between multiple electrical devices. In a computer, the term was originally derived from the electric definition. In general terms, it means a collection of wires through which data is transmitted from one part of a computer to another. If you’ve seen the insides of a computer, you might have noticed what seems to be a card that plugs perpendicularly into a slot in the motherboard. The slot in the motherboard is the bus. The card can be a graphics card (handles the video needs of your computer and is what the monitor is connected to), perhaps a network card (to connect to the network at your place and to the internet), even the RAM, and so forth.

So back to the original subject, a port can be connected directly into the motherboard (integrated) or through a card connected to a bus that is attached to the motherboard.

You’ve seen plenty of different kinds of ports. Your mouse and keyboard connect to a port in the back of the computer (called PS/2). Your computer speakers connect to an audio port, and as mentioned before your computer monitor is connected to the graphics port in your computer. Printers connect to a port in the back of your computer called parallel port. More about parallel port in a moment.

There is one last type of port that deserves special mention, as it has become widely used in recent years. Many of you have probably heard the acronym USB when talking about a computer connection, or perhaps a cable. “My iPod connects to my laptop though a USB cable”, or “I have a flash drive that connects to any USB port in my computer”. But how many people know what USB stands for, and more importantly, how many people know what it means? well, you’re about to become one of the lucky ones who are in the know.

Having defined bus above pays off now, since USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. Universal because when created back in the 1990’s it was meant to replace all the different types of connections between a computer and external devices.  Serial because, when talking about ports, it refers to a type that allows data transfer to occur one bit at a time, as opposed to parallel, where simultaneous streams of data can flow concurrently from a port (parallel ports were mostly used for connecting printers to computers and now have, for the most part, become outdated and replaced with USB ports, or sometimes network – Ethernet – ports).

In conclusion, the computer  produces a flow of outgoing data to some external devices and receive input from others, all connected together through ports,  which when properly operating form an harmonious system that becomes more than the sum of its parts – a synergy.