Input, output and storage devices

Input, output and storage devices

1. Output

   • Phone
     • A touch screen is the only device which works as both an input and an output device. You view the options available to you on the screen (output) and you then use your finger to touch the option that you have chosen (input).
   • Monitor
     • It really is that easy to tell the difference, but be warned, some devices can be both input and output! When you are using the monitor it displays things that you are doing, such as moving windows and clicking on website links. At no point do you click on the screen or put anything into the monitor.
   • Shedder
   • Tablet
     • A graphics tablet consists of a flat pad (the tablet) on which the user draws with a special pen. As the user draws on the pad the image is created on the screen. Using a graphics tablet a designer can produce very accurate on-screen drawings as if they were drawing on paper.
   • Printer
     • There are many input and output devices such as multifunction printers and computer-based navigation systems that are used for specialised or unique applications. In computing, input/output refers to the communication between an information processing system (such as a computer), and the outside world.
   • Headphones
     • Speakers and headphones are output devices that can play sound. You can control the output by turning the volume up or down. A webcam usually has a microphone built-in and both are input devices.
   • Projector
     • Digital projector. A digital projector is a device which connects to a computer and is used to project the video output from the computer onto a wall or screen.
   • Speaker
     • Speakers are popular output devices used with computer systems. They receive audio input from the computer's sound card and produce audio output in the form of sound waves.
   • Cash machine screen
     • A touch-sensitive visual display unit (VDU) or screen has a grid of light beams or fine wires criss-crossing the screen that are used to detect touch. Many mobile phones use touch screens and do away with the keypad entirely. They're often used on cash machines and in shopping centres too. Touch screens are robust, easy to operate and easy to reprogram.

2. Input

   • Microphone
     • Microphones are used to input sound. In computing they can be used with voice recognition software and a word processing application to enter text. Webcams commonly have microphones built-in too.
   • Digital pen
     • A digital pen is a battery-operated writing instrument that allows the user to digitally capture a handwritten note or drawing. Typically, a digital pen comes with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cradle to let the user upload the handwritten notes to a personal computer (PC). The pen looks like a regular ball-point pen and can be used as such, but requires special digital paper if the user wishes to digitally capture what he has written. A page of digital paper, which can be purchased in traditional pad or sticky-note size, has small dots on it that allow the pen to "see" what has been written.
   • Phone
     • A touch sensitive visual display unit (VDU) or screen has a grid of light beams or fine wires criss-crossing the screen that are used to detect touch. Many mobile phones use touch screens and do away with the keypad entirely. They're often used on cash machines and in shopping centres too. Touch screens are robust, easy to operate and easy to reprogram.
   • Controller
     • A video digitiser takes an image from a video camera or television and digitises it so it can be read by, and stored on, a computer. Video sequences captured using a video digitiser are often used in multimedia presentations.
   • Scanner
     • A scanner can be used to digitise images. They're similar to a photocopier but they make a digital copy instead of a physical copy. They can also be used with optical character recognition (OCR) software to scan in text that is then editable.
   • Webcam
     • A webcam is an input device because it captures a video image of the scene in front of it. It is either built in to the computer (e.g. laptop) or it is connected through an USB cable.
   • Camera
     • Video Camera. A device that captures moving images, or video. Like a digital camera, most video cameras do not directly input data into a computer – the captured movies are stored on video-tape or memory cards and later transferred to a computer.
   • Keyboard
     • Video Camera. A device that captures moving images, or video. Like a digital camera, most video cameras do not directly input data into a computer – the captured movies are stored on video-tape or memory cards and later transferred to a computer.
   • Touch pad
     • Touchpad. Alternatively referred to as a glide pad, glide point, pressure sensitive tablet, or trackpad, a touchpad is an input device on laptops and some keyboards to move a cursor with your finger. It can be used in place of an external mouse.

3. Storage

   • Cloud storage
     • Users generally pay for their cloud data storage on a per-consumption, monthly rate. Although the per-gigabyte cost has been radically driven down, cloud storage providers have added operating expenses that can make the technology more expensive than users bargained for.
   • Hard drive
     • Users generally pay for their cloud data storage on a per-consumption, monthly rate. Although the per-gigabyte cost has been radically driven down, cloud storage providers have added operating expenses that can make the technology more expensive than users bargained for.
   • Sim card
     • A SIM card and can be switched easily from one phone set to another. The portability of data offers a number of benefits. For example, a user that buys a new phone can install the current SIM card to associate the new phone with the same number and user preferences as the old one. In another common situation, if a phone's battery runs out of power, the user can easily install the card to another subscriber's phone to borrow it without running up that user's minutes. Some vendors offer prepaid SIM cards that can provide travelers with local numbers, as long as their cell phones are not locked to a specific carrier.
   • Recorder
     • A data storage device is a device for recording (storing) information (data). Recording can be done using virtually any form of energy, spanning from manual muscle power in handwriting, to acoustic vibrations in phonographic recording, to electromagnetic energy modulating magnetic tape and optical discs. A storage device may hold information, process information, or both. A device that only holds information is a recording medium. Devices that process information (data storage equipment) may either access a separate portable (removable) recording medium or a permanent component to store and retrieve data.
   • USB
     • A USB drive -- also known as a flash drive or keychain drive -- is a plug-and-play portable storage device that uses flash memory and is lightweight enough to attach to a keychain. A USB drive can be used in place of a floppy disk, Zip drive disk or CD. When the user plugs the device into the USB port, the computer's operating system recognizes the device as a removable drive and assigns it a drive letter.
   • CD
     • Compact disks are known as optical storage devices. Data is burned onto the surface of the disk using a laser beam in the CD drive. A laser beam is also used to read the data stored on the disk. A CD can store around 650 Mb of data.
   • Pen Drive
   • Memory card
     • A memory card or flash card is an electronic flash memory data storage device used for storing digital information. These are commonly used in portable electronic devices, such as digital cameras, mobile phones, laptop computers, tablets, MP3 players and video game consoles.

4. Processing

   • Sound card
     • A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates economical input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware inside the PC. Typical uses of sound cards include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection.
   • Motherboard
     • A central processing unit is the control center of a computer. It stores program instructions and converts data. The motherboard connects the CPU, memory, video card, hard drive and other computer components together. Memory holds the instructions for processing data.
   • Graphic processing unit (GPU)
     • A graphics processing unit (GPU), also occasionally called visual processing unit (VPU), is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing, and their highly parallel structure makes them more efficient than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where the processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel.
   • Circuit board
   • Network card
     • A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface,[1] and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.[2] Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus. The low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard. Modern network interface controllers offer advanced features such as interrupt and DMA interfaces to the host processors, support for multiple receive and transmit queues, partitioning into multiple logical interfaces, and on-controller network traffic processing such as the TCP offload engine.
   • Storage
     • Once data has been entered into a computer and processed, it needs to be stored. It may only need to be stored temporarily, i.e. whilst it is being used or it might need to be stored permanently so that it is available for use at a later date. A storage device is any media which is used to store data.
   • Central processing unit (CPU)
     • The central processing unit (CPU) is the brain of your computer. It handles all the instructions you give your computer, and the faster it does this, the better. Learn about how a CPU processes instructions and how computer engineers are continuously coming up with ways to make it go faster.