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Desktop Computer Accessories

Desktop computer accessories today include thousands of different devices. To a simple desktop with the right interfaces almost any laptop/desktop accessory can be connected, and even some industrial accessories too, like robotics controllers (and robots), different types of microscopes, telescopes, oscilloscopes …and so on. This is possible because personal computers are becoming more and more powerful every year. Those years are over when only NASA had computers with sufficient (?) speed to guide Apollo spaceships to the Moon and back.

There are a few types of computer accessories:

Input: data flows from the device to the computer
Output: data flows from the computer to the device
Input & Output: data flows in both directions
Other non-digital accessories: there’s no data transfer

Input devices (or accessories) include keyboards, mice, microphones (and other audio sources), webcams, digital video cameras, TV-Tuners, scanners, DVD-ROMs, power reset and sleep buttons …etc.

Output devices (or accessories) are screens, printers, speakers, projectors, LEDs.

I/O devices (or accessories) are mostly storage and communication devices, like dvd-writers, external hard disks and networks, The Internet, telephone lines …etc.

Non-digital accessories are components or external devices that ensure the right electrical and thermal conditions for the computer’s components and accessories. Accessories that belong to this category are fans, power adapters, fluorescent lights, cables …etc.

Today’s most frequently used desktop computer accessories are the ones that are already incorporated in most laptop computers:

- Keyboard – the best input device ever, in the last 100 years no one came up with a better idea than the QWERTY keyboard:

- Pointing device – laptops and some desktop keyboard include touch pads, but the best pointing device ever developed is the computer mouse, undefeated since apple first introduced it (the original Apple one-button mouse).

- Speakers – that’s something that any digital or analog device must have for warning sounds or simply for music/film/game/application sound.

- Image input – usually a simple webcam, incorporated in (or placed on) the top of the laptop/desktop screen, that’s used together with a microphone in most cases.

Printers are becoming less practical desktop computer accessories, because storing stuff on hard drives, dvds or on the internet is much safer than keeping physical documents, photos or videotapes. Authorities and firms in evolved states already accept documents in digital form, thus simplifying procedures and making everything more efficient. In more primitive states you still have to do everything by going down to the authorities, filling out forms, taking documents and files to different institutes in the city or state and paying at a completely different place. Faxes are also obsolete, in fact they had a very short life. Although the fax was invented a long time ago, when it was finally manufactured at a larger scale the Internet and free E-Mail services were already wide-spread and far more practical.