I’ve been using computers for almost 2 decades now and I’ve noticed that PC input devices have grown a lot. Before, the PC was just the PC and there weren’t any other input devices aside from the keyboard.
PC Input devices are equipments or gadgets that send data or information to the PC. The most common example would be the keyboard. It sends keyboard presses to the PC. When I started using the PC, all I ever used was a keyboard. It was during the 286 CPU days. At that time, it was actually fine just to use keyboards alone. Windows wasn’t available here at that time and even the mouse was not used. All programs and software are text-based and designs only came from special characters and text formatting.
But then, the next important update that happened was the introduction of Windows 3.1. I never got to use early versions though. At that time, I started using the mouse. More applications were created for Windows and input devices such as the pen and tablet became more famous.
After a few years, Windows 95 was released and it started to change drastically. With the development of Windows, it started to take advantage of the PCs capability to receive data. There were still the usual Serial and Parallel ports but with the development of new applications and the growing processing power of the computers, the boundaries of the old PCs have been broken.
Scanners began to rise as another famous input device. It’s so convenient that instead of having to manually copy a picture to the PC, you can have a scanner to copy the image into a file. It was a bit tedious before because even at low resolutions, it could take more than a minute for a scanned picture to be processed. Scanners nowadays have insane resolutions at blazing fast speeds. My current scanner can go even over 9 megapixels in resolution in just a few seconds.
The PCs became more powerful and are more capable of handling new technologies such as the digital camera. When it started to boom, people were amazed that pictures need not be developed anymore. Come to think of it, you can put thousands of images in a single memory stick/card compared to 30 or so in a film. Even gaming input devices have evolved from simple joysticks to an entire set of gaming gadget.
Computers are getting more and more powerful and who knows what technologies are in store for us. Not to mention the improvements of fast interfaces such as USB and Firewire. Can’t wait to see what’s next. The convenience of having different input devices handled by your PC is just simple amazing.
