The Universal Serial Bus (USB) has been around for a number of years, and its creation has solved the problem of a lack of or incompatible connections available to link computer peripherals to a computer. Before USB was available, most devices were required to connect to a computer by using parallel and serial ports. These two ports have been around for 2 decades, serving effectively in linking computer peripherals to a computer. Unfortunately there was a problem: a standard computer has only 1 or 2 serial ports and one parallel port. This severely limited the number of computer peripherals that could be attached to a single computer. Thus, if a user wanted to connect a joystick, printer, and scanner, they might require the use of every port installed on their computer. Since these ports also require the computer to be powered off before any connections can be made or broken, switching peripherals was inconvenient. Even more problematic was that the data transmission rate between these devices and the computer was prohibitively slow for any but the oldest devices.
The first USB version released is called USB 1.1, and transmits data at the rate of 12 Mbps. Later USB 2.0...