Computer Essentials Define Input Device,

Computer Essentials

Define input device, output device, and storage device. Discuss the types available.

The collection of devices that attach to personal computers including laptops for entering data, gaining access to the data in visual or printed form, and storing the data and resulting information generated from applications are known of as computer peripherals. The most common input devices include the computer mouse, which today can be either connected to the PC or laptop via cable or supported through wireless connection using BlueTooth communications technologies. There are also touchpads that many laptops provide, with the IBM ThinkPad Series being the most prevalent in their use of this approach to data input. There is also voice recognition software applications where the PC or laptop user can also speak what they want captured within a given document and the software will interpret the speak patterns and then record the spoken words into a file. Voice recognition software requires users to "train" the interpretation routines the software to be able to correctly interpolate the right words from the spoken word. Additional input devices include applications that can accept inbound messaging over the Internet and also through dial-up modems. These input devices include modems that support dial-up, cable modem and direct connection to the Internet (Goldsborough, 2004, p. 9)

Output devices for PC and laptop users include the screen of the system itself, and this could be as simple as the plasma screen on their laptop or as complex as a high resolution flat screen monitor. In addition to visual output, there are also a wide variety of devices that print images and text from PCs and laptops as well. Printers can be based on a wide variety of technologies including inkjet, laser engine, dye sublimation (for high quality color, electrostatic, and the older dot matrix impact printers as well. Today the prevalent technologies for printing output from a computer include what are called "non-impact" technologies or inkjet and laser-based printing devices.

There are an equally wide range of devices for storage of data and resulting information generated on PCs and laptops. Hard disk drives that often include multiple storage platters where data is written to and read from using read/write heads enclosed in the hard disk enclosure are commonplace. Hard drive manufacturers are increasingly shrinking the size of these hard drives, so much so that in 2008 the first camcorders that have 50GB of hard disk space for recording movies is now available. In addition to hard drives, there is also a growing popularity of flash memory-based drives that have Universal Serial Bus (USB) connections on them. These are often called "pen" drives as they are small enough to be mounted at the top of a pen (David 2003). The convenience of these types of storage devices is changing how PC and laptop users store, share and archive data and information.