Serial transmissions are relatively slow because information has to travel one bit at the time down a single wire. During the days of the AT form factor, they were added through a series of jumpers.

Serial connectors were one of the first types of connectors included with motherboards. However, be aware that practitioners (us!) often use the terms connector and port interchangeably. The term port is used to describe the logical function associated with a connector for example, an RS-232 port is accessed via a DB-25 connector and an Ethernet port is accessed using an RJ-45 connector. The term connector is used to describe a physical-mechanical device used to interconnect electronic components or cables a connector can be either male or female. Keep in mind the following point of clarification regarding connectors and ports. Common external connections include serial, parallel, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, USB, FireWire, and Bluetooth. There are many types of external connections that can be made with a computer. Figure 2 illustrates the parallel transmission.įigure 2: Parallel Transmission Types of Connectors and Ports Typically, there are eight wires in a channel so one byte of data is sent at a time. Parallel transmission refers to the transmission of x bits across a channel at a time, where x is the number of wires in the channel. Figure 1 illustrates serial transmission.Īmong other applications, serial ports are often used to allow a technician to interface with the operating system of a device by typing commands in a terminal window that is spawned by software that communicates with the device through the serial connection. Serial transmission refers to the transmission of data down a single wire one bit at a time.

I/O ports send and receive data in the form of bits (0s and 1s), which can be transmitted in serial or parallel. I/O ports transmit data via serial or parallel connections that can be manipulated from within the BIOS. External devices connect to a computer using Input/ Output ( I/O) ports. Internally they connect to the PCI slots, PCI express slots, IDE interface, SATA interface, or some other bus system. Identify the appropriate connector or cable for various hardware components.Īll devices connect to the motherboard in some way.Identify connector types and associated cables.Identify the characteristics of connection interfaces.

Serial connector types