If you are going to buy a new PC soon, perhaps for the holiday season, there is one very important fact that you should know. All those old serial, parallel, and other ports are now officially history. What is going on?
When IBM architected the PC, back in 1981 or so, they were in a rush to get the product to market, and choose to use standard interfaces and connectors where possible. The choice for the printer port was the standard 25-pin Centronics connector (named for an original small computer printer manufacturer that has long since gone under), and the 25-pin serial connector (which looked the same as the parallel connector but had the pins the opposite way). These were standard in the industry at the time - I had them on my TRS-80. They chose a 5-pin connector for the keyboard, although there was no established standard for that. Eventually the serial connector was shortened to 9 pins, and that interface also used for early mice.
But the overriding design goal was to have different connectors for everything - the idea was that you couldn't make a mistake connecting your peripherals. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. But two major drawbacks on these interfaces were that they could only support one device at a time (although there was a lot of "cheating" on the parallel port to support scanners) and that they were not "hot plug" - i.e. you could not plug or remove them with the power on.
About ten years ago, a cross-industry group was put together to solve this, and to make connectors standard for all peripheral devices. The result was USB as we know it today, and USB has been enormously successful. USB is fully hot-plug, and you still can't make a mistake in plugging it in because all devices use the same connector. Another interface, called Firewire, was also developed mostly for higher speed devices, such as external hard drives or video cameras.
The problem is this: after USB became established, Microsoft began encouraging manufacturers to drop all the old interfaces in favor of USB only. It took quite a while for this to occur, but it has now started with the introduction of the "BX" style of PC chassis. The old "ATX" style was used for many years, but the BX is much better for heat management and other factors. But along with the BX advantages, all the old legacy ports were officially dropped from the products.
Thus, if you buy a newer PC model (such as the Dell 5100 series), there may be no legacy ports. What does this mean to you?
With respect to mice and keyboards, they have been all USB for years now, and since most PCs ship with them there is probably no problem here. If you have an older printer, it may have both parallel and USB interfaces. Even if you are using the parallel interface on your old PC, you may be able to just get a new USB cable and plug it into your new PC. If your printer has only parallel, it's so old that a replacement is in order.
Recent scanners are either USB or Firewire - if you have an older SCSI interface or parallel interface scanner, it's time to upgrade also.
If you choose not to upgrade, you can buy adapters that convert the old devices to USB - but I don't recommend them. They are cranky, difficult to use, and don't support all devices. Adding their expense to the equation, you are much better off buying a new device.
Another thing to consider is that if the PC you want to buy still has the old ports, it may not be the latest-and-greatest model.
The bottom line here is that you should be aware of the change, and check all your current peripheral devices when ordering that new PC.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)