Some devices can be both input and output devices. In this video, you’ll learn about touch screen, KVMs, smart TVs, set-top boxes, and MIDI interfaces.
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Some devices allow us to put information into our computer and get information out of our computer. In this video, we’ll look at some common input and output devices.
One very common device that acts as both input and output is a touch screen. We see information on the screen as output, and we can push on the screen with our finger to provide the input. And these touch screens are everywhere. They are on our car information systems, they’re at airports when we’re checking in, we have them in our home, they’re at banks, in the stores where we’re shopping, on our mobile devices, and even on our desktop computers.
If you’re working in a data center or an environment that has many different computers, you may want to connect them all with KVM. KVM stands for Keyboard, Video, and Mouse. And this allows you to use a single keyboard, mouse, and video output to be able to connect to multiple computers. You can simply push a button on the KVM, or use software to be able to move from one computer to the other, all with the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
Our televisions used to be one-way output devices, but now they provide both output and input through the use of apps that are running on these Smart TVs. We would get information into the television with our remote control, maybe an external keyboard, or even with voice communication. And of course, the display itself is the output device.
Many televisions will connect to our 802.11 wireless network and some TVs have a jack so you can connect a wired Ethernet link. If you don’t have a Smart TV, you may still be able to get some intelligence from a set-top box. These are devices that will connect to your computer and usually provided by your cable company, or your television provider. This is usually something that allows us to not only view channels in real-time, but it may provide a streaming media functionality as well.
We usually get information into these set-top boxes through a remote control, or even voice communication, and the output is coming onto our television display. This is something that connects, usually, to our local network with an Ethernet connection or 802.11 wireless. It of course is connecting to the cable provider, or television provider’s network, and it’s usually connecting to our display device with HDMI.
If you’re a musician, you’ve probably connected your musical device directly to your computer through a standard called MIDI. MIDI stands for a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it’s been a standard that’s been around since 1983. A traditional MIDI connection uses these 5-pin DIN connectors. You can see ones that are connecting through the input and output interfaces on this device. But modern MIDI devices are instead using USB connectivity, Ethernet connections, or even FireWire.