Nowadays, computers have taken a leading place in human life. From the start of development, computers have been striving for personalization. Those. move from bulky computer rooms to miniature PCs. The goal is a computer in every home. However, time is changing and science does not stand still. Semiconductors and microcircuits gave a slightly different vision of a home computer. Having achieved the goal - a computer for everyone, manufacturers asked themselves another - functionality. Now a modern computer is a hybrid of several devices at once, to which various information output devices can be connected.
The transition from a quantitative to a qualitative indicator occurred due to the achievement of optimal sizes. Modern touch screens have removed the keys and joysticks for entering information. Stationary PCs focused more on power characteristics - the amount of RAM and permanent memory, frequency, number of cores and video size. Nowadays, this is conditional, as modern tablets catch up with PC parameters. Now it's all about the diagonal of the screen and the price.
Actually tablets do not owe their appearance to PCs, but to laptops. Laptops (laptops) have become a portable type of PC with smaller sizes. After them netbooks appeared - a stripped-down version of laptops with a smaller diagonal. A separate contribution was made by mobile phones. They gradually grew into smartphones and PDAs. The symbiosis of various devices resulted in tablet PCs.
In the history of the evolution of computers, peripherals should be noted - input devices and information output devices . A computer in itself is a processing center that must have a mandatory interaction with a person. By means of information input devices, a person (operator) sets a task and options for its implementation. These include: keyboard, manipulators (mouse, joystick, steering wheel ...), scanner, webcam, touchpad and microphone. Recently, the screen (touch) also applies to them . All of them are divided into various types: sound, video, graphic, text and manipulation.
In turn, the output device is a device that is designed to convert the results of machine code into an understandable (human) form. Options for types of output can be: visual, tactile, recording, sound and light. Visual information output devices - display, printer, projector. Tactile include joysticks with feedback and specialized printers for the blind. Recording devices - disk drives, floppies (for floppy disks), USB-sockets (for flash drives) and card readers (for memory cards). Sound devices - speakers, headphones, subwoofer and system unit speakers. Light - diode indication on other devices and computer parts.
Over time, some information output devices simply went into oblivion. This is due to the creators of various content. For example, modern games and films have formats that take up a large amount of space (in GB). Because of the development of graphics in this form of content, diskettes and disks are a thing of the past. On the other hand, new ones have appeared. The already mentioned display, which has become an input / output device for information. Printers became not only color and printing large formats (plotters), but also reached a new qualitative level - 3D.
The new fashion - 3D - has made adjustments to the entire digital world. In addition to monitors with support for 3D images, cameras with 3D shooting, 3D printers appeared. Now printing on the printer has become more meaningful. This technology is called rapid prototyping. This is quite popular in mechanical engineering, medicine and design organizations. Such a printer no longer prints a color image or pseudo-3D, it produces ready-made elements. By sintering a special powder in layers, you get the part (and even small assemblies) at the output. There is much to talk about the benefits of creating such elements.
The history of the development of computers and their peripherals is quite dynamic. In less than a century, they have surpassed any other technologies in terms of development dynamics. And what will happen tomorrow is hard to guess already. Regarding the periphery, we can only say that there is still room for unification and hybridization. In any case, it will be interesting to see. After all, back in the 90s it was considered a powerful PC with a 14-inch CRT monitor , 128 MB RAM, 64 MB graphics card and 1 GB Winchester. And now?..