Peripheral

This article is about a type of hardware device. For other uses, see Periphery.

"Computer peripherals" redirects here. For the American printer manufacturer, see Computer Peripherals.

A peripheral device, or simply peripheral, is an auxiliary hardware device that a computer uses to transfer information externally.^[1] A peripheral is a hardware component that is accessible to and controlled by a computer but is not a core component of the computer.

A computer keyboard and mouse, a common type of computer peripheral.

A peripheral can be categorized based on the direction in which information flows relative to the computer:

• The computer receives data from an input device; examples: mouse, keyboard, scanner, game controller, microphone and webcam

• The computer sends data to an output device; examples: monitor, printer, headphones, and speakers

• The computer sends and receives data via an input/output device; examples: storage device (such as disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, memory card and tape drive), modem, router, gateway and network adapter

Many modern electronic devices, such as Internet-enabled digital watches, video game consoles, smartphones, and tablet computers, have interfaces for use as a peripheral.

History

One of the earliest known computer peripherals to be made was the punched card, which was first introduced into computing in the late 1880s by Herman Hollerith, an American engineer.^[2] As a result, the punched card tabulator was invented, which was able to read the punch cards.^[3] In addition, it was the first computer peripheral to be mass-produced.^[2] In 1901, the introduction of the punched card also led to the creation of the Hollerith Type 001 Mechanical Card Punch, would become the basis of computer keyboards. The keypunch allowed operators to punch the digits 0-9, without the user having prior knowledge of the corresponding card codes.^[4]

Punched tape was later used instead of punched cards as a computer peripheral, because of it's lower cost, and higher storage capacity.^[5] Programs were written to punched tape using existing teleprinters^[6], then were transferred to a reader so that a computer could load the program.^[7] The first documented computer to use punched tape as storage was the Zuse Z1, released in 1938 by German inventor Konrad Zuse. which was able to read source code on punched tape.^[8]

In the early 1950s, the UNISERVO I, created for the UNIVAC I computer, became the first commercially available magnetic tape drive.^[9] Magnetic tape drives have both the ability to read and write to magnetic tape.^[10] Magnetic tape is often used to backup or archive digital data for long periods of time, due to it's higher cost efficiency compared to other storage mediums^[11], and because it is not possible cannot both read and write to magnetic tape at the same time.^[12]

In 1956, the IBM 305 RAMAC was the first the first commercial computer to ship with a hard disk, the IBM Model 350.^[13] The IBM Model 350 was the first hard disk, and it had the ability to be randomly read and written to at any time.^[14] The hard drive was able to store 5 MB of storage.^[15] To achieve this, it used fifty magnetic disks, that were double sided and had a diameter of 24 inches each, spinning at 1200 RPM.^[16]

See also

• Display device
• Expansion card
• Punched card input/output
• Punched tape
• Video game accessory