CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.4. Other Output Devices

Video cards and sound cards are two of the most popular types of output devices found in systems today, but they are not the only types of output devices. This section overviews some of the other types of output devices found in computer systems:

• Multimedia cards: Not really an output device, but when it comes to multimedia, video and sound files have to be stored somewhere. A number of devices today use multimedia cards (MMC), which are sticks of memory (the size of a stamp) used with a multimedia device, such as a music player or digital camera.

• I/O devices: Any number of input/output (I/O) devices may be connected to your system. These devices (such as printers, scanners, and fax devices) can connect to your system in any form, such as SCSI, serial, or even parallel. Here is a summary of some of the technologies used with I/O devices:

  • SCSI: SCSI technology supports daisy chaining (having one device connect to the next). To connect a SCSI device to your system, you need a SCSI card, and you also need to ensure that you assign unique IDs to each device and terminate both ends of the SCSI bus. Typically, storage devices such as drives, CD-ROMs, and tapes appear as SCSI devices.

  • Serial: Some I/O devices are serial devices that connect to the serial port of the computer. An example of an I/O device that may connect to the serial port is a modem.

    NOTE

    The serial connection is defined in the RS-232 standard and sends data one bit at a time.

  • Parallel: Parallel ...