I am amazed at all the advances that have been made in technology since the time I purchased my first PC in 1994. While that machine did what I needed it to do at the time, so many new innovations have been introduced that were never even thought of in the early to mid '90's. At that time the internet and Microsoft Windows were both in their infancy. Dial up was the only way for the average person to access the internet and laptops were much larger and much more expensive than they are today. It is really astonishing to think that in a matter of about fifteen years, we have gone from plugging in a phone line to access the internet as we sat at our desks to plugging in a usb wireless card for internet access at home and and on the go.

The introduction of the USB (universal serial bus) port is one of the technological advances that has changed many things in the computer world. The USB port was introduced because of a need to have a universal interface that could be used by a wide variety of peripheral devices. It eliminated the need for special adaptors, setting DIP switches, and diagnosing hardware conflicts when adding a new device to a computer. Before the widespread popularity of USB devices, adding a device could be a nightmare. That nightmare has been eliminated and computer users now enjoy the ease of "plug and play" USB devices.

Before the widespread use of USB ports, if you wanted to add a device and you didn't have an available plug, you had to open your computer and add and adapter card. If you didn't have an open slot in the case to add and adapter card, well, you were out of luck. Now, If you need more USB ports than your computer supplies, you can plug in a hub that provides extra USB ports.

Early PC's had disk drives that utilized floppy disks for copying information from one computer to another. These disks would hold less than 2 MB. Compare that with the USB flash drives of today that measure their storage capacity in gigabytes and you can see yet another way that USB has made a positive difference for computer users.

While I am sure that technology will bring us even more innovations in the future, for now I am really glad that the USB port became a standard as it makes many things easier for me.