0 What Are The Computer Cables?

In this introduction page I am talking about computer cables used to mount a computer as drive's cables and the USB cable to plug all your accessories and peripherals.
There are more cables used to mount a computer like the power cord of your computer case, but those cables did not changed throughout the years.
So lets talk about what has been improved and what has changed something.

Floppy Drive, CD DVD Drive and Hard Drive Cables (flat ribbon cable)

There are 3 types of drives cables. The ribbon for hard and optic drives, the inverted ways ribbon for floppy drives and the Serial ATA cable for hard drives.
The standard drive ribbon has been the first to hit the market along with the floppy drive ribbon.
The ribbon cables are the only one that received support improvements over the years improving data storage and data's transfer rates for newer hard drives.
Originally, ribbon cables were called IDE. When manufacturers started to enhance the technology, they started to call the ribbon EIDE then ATA then PATA. Nowdays, the ribbon is called ATA or PATA.
Here the link for ATA cables I explain in details.

Ribbon Cable For HDD and Optic Drives

The floppy drive ribbon is easily recognized by its inverted ways. Beside its inverted ways, it has the same configuration as the standard drive ribbon above except that it does not fit in an ATA bus on the motherboard.
3.5' floppy drives as we know them today, the ribbon cable has never changed, no improvement at all.

Inverted ways ribbon cable for floppy drives

Serial-ATA Hard Drive Cable

The new and very improved SATA cable. Mainly for hard drives, the cable is way thinner than his older friend and supports the high performance offered by the Serial-ATA standard.
This SATA cable marks the end of ribbons. More and more computers are built with the SATA interface. You can expect a fast disappearance of ribbon cables.
Take a look at that page for detailed infromation on SATA interface.

USB Cable And Firewire Cable

Firewire and USB are both a serial bus interface standard. Firewire being Apple, I will not talk much about it, because this site is about PC even if Firewire did touch the PC market at some stages. The Firewire interface is better than the USB at a certain point, but nothing to be scare of. It is not a big lost for us PC users.

USB Computer Cable

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is the design answer to Apple Firewire. The USB interface fixed a major problem in PC computers.
In the early days, PC computers were not built with lot of hardware, enabling the use of serial or parallel peripherals without hardware's addressing problems. But nowadays we use several peripherals and this cause conflicts addressing among peripherals and other hardware.
The port adressing was used for the hardware to comunicate with the external devices like the mouse or the monitor, but without the USB interface, our modern computers would have lots of conflicts with the port adressing. Thinking about all the devices we are using nowadays, I cannot imagine a computer without USB.

[I hope you appreciated the computer cables introduction guide
and I invite you to take a look at the other guides.]