Describe any two input devices and two output devices in detail and explain the developments

that occurred on these devices over the years. What does the future hold for them?
1. INPUT DEVICES

a). MOUSE - The computer mouse is an input device that has come a long way since Doug
Englebart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first one back in
1964. Consumers first started using the mouse on the Macintosh. Now almost every operating
system relies on a mouse. The device that translates movements on a horizontal surface into
movements of a pointer or cursor on the screen. There are two types of mouse namely OptoMechanical and Optical mouses. The opto-mechanical is the oldest one while optical is the
modern one. The 1st type of mouse the OPTO-MECHANICAL type contains a round ball that
makes contact with 2 rollers, 1 for the x-axis & the other fory. The rollers allow light to shine
through an optical sensor in flashes as they turn. By the speed and patterns of the light pulses, the
mouse senses the speed and direction the mouse is moving and sends its interpretation of those
movements to the computer and the mouse control software.
The 2nd type is the OPTICAL MOUSE which looks like the 1st type except that there is no ball.
Instead the mouse uses a special mouse pad and a beam of laser light. The beam of light shines
onto the mouse pad and reflects back to a sensor in the mouse to detect direction and speed of
movements. The mouse pad has small lines crossing it that can reflect the light into the sensor in
different ways. The mouse will not work without this special mouse pad.
The mechanical mouse that relies on a trackball will be first to go; only the cheapest of
computers will still come with a mechanical mouse. The optical mouse and the wireless mouse
will become the standard in the near future.
The future seems to be getting closer, however. Gyration has created a wireless optical mouse
that can be used on the desktop, or even in the air. The Gyration mouse incorporates gyroscopic
technology to translate wrist movements to the on-screen cursor. It's only a matter of time, until
video screens become larger and larger. Users will start to want to move further from the video
screen, which creates the need for a mobile mouse that is not restricted to the surface area of a

desk. The real threat to the mouse comes from the technology shift we are seeing in the move
from stationary computing to mobile computing. As notebooks and wireless capabilities
proliferate in the market, users require an integrated user interface that is easily accessible and
easy to use. Synaptic is creating user-interface devices for a wide variety of digital products. The
company recently started showing a new product, called Round Pad that allows users to scroll by
moving their finger in a circular motion around the outside edge of a round touchpad device.
Such a device could be used not only in laptops, but also in desktop keyboards as a replacement
for the mouse. As more homes convert to home theater PCs, for example, Rauholt predicts the
remote control and the mouse eventually will merge into one device. Even further in the future,
potential threats to the mouse might include eye-tracking and touch-screen technologies.
Touchpads already have replaced the mouse on laptop computers, and touch screens are
supplementing or replacing these technologies on Tablet PCs. But so far, "none have been
successful on the desktop.
2. KEYBOARD

A keyboard is an input device that translates keystrokes into letters and numbers. There are two
types which are mechanical and capacitative keyboards. The invention of the computer keyboard
(QWERTY keyboard) starts with the typewriter. The inventor of the typewriter is Christopher
Sholes who also designed the arrangement of characters of keyboard which is called QWERTY
keyboard. The name QWERTY was derived from the first six characters on the top alphabetic
line of the keyboard. The mechanical key switch keyboard uses an individual switch for each
key. Pressing a key creates a connection between 2 signal lines from the keyboard controller.
When a connection is made the keyboard controller sends a signal to the computer with
information about the type of key selected. The capacitative is a keyboard with two sheets of
semi-conductive material separated by a thin sheet of mylar .When a key is pressed the plunger
presses the 2 sheets of semi-conductive material together , changing the total capacitance of the 2
sheets. The keyboard controller can tell the key selected by the amount of capacitance.
The future seems to be getting closer as there might be keyboards for disadvantage groups such
as the blind, either keyboards with different languages, wireless or water resistance ones.
DataHand Systems claims that her Ergonomic keyboard helps reduce finger travel by 88%,
eliminates need to visually establish home-rom hand position, 80% less repetitious than any
other computer keyboards on the market. They are designed and developed to help people avoid
hand strains and injuries for long hours typing. The DataHand keyboard assistive technology
offers a total of 132 keys (more than even extended flat keyboards) through the use of five key-

switches clustered around the tips of each of the fingers. With four modes, shifted by the thumbs,
hand movement is no longer required to perform keyboard work. Hand support results in the
elimination of the major source of musculoskeletal stress in hands, wrists, arms, shoulders,
backs, and necks.
DataHand keyboard users are no longer forced to conform to an arbitrary, stressful, and
contorting keyboard design. As user testimonials make clear, the DataHand keyboard is also the
most efficient assistive technology keyboard and mouse alternative on the market. Dramatically
different in appearance from the traditional flat keyboard, the DataHand keyboard incorporates
unique finger and thumb switch modules within two contoured hand rests. Also the hands are
naturally supported, completely supporting both the hands and arms.
Innovative DataHand key modules wrap the keys three dimensionally around the tips of the
fingers to offer unique ergonomic and productivity benefits. Five keys are placed directly north,
south, east, west, and directly below the tip of each finger. Six key-switches are placed around
the thumb. Two of these are below each thumb. The thumbs down switches are two stage
switches with the second stage serving as a mode lock. The first level shifts into the mode
temporarily, and second level of the switch locks the mode until the switch is touched again to
release it.The DataHand ergonomic keyboard dramatically reduces both variables of the work
formula force and distance. By placing the keys in close proximity to the fingers, finger travel
distance is greatly reduced. Key activation forces are also reduced by 50 percent or more, and
operating speed is improved.

2. OUTPUT DEVICES
a).Monitor- commonly called Visual Display Unit VDU, are the main output device of a
computer. It forms images from tiny dots, called pixels that are arranged in a rectangular form.
The sharpness of the image depends upon the number of pixels. There are two kinds of viewing
screen used for monitors. Cathode-Ray Tube CRT and Flat- Panel Display Cathode-Ray Tube
CRT Monitor. The CRT display is made up of small picture elements called pixels. The smaller
the pixels, the better the image clarity, or resolution. It takes more than one illuminated pixel to
form whole character, such as the letter e in the word help. A finite number of characters can be
displayed on a screen at once. The screen can be divided into a series of character boxes - fixed
location on the screen where a standard character can be placed. Most screens are capable of
displaying 80 characters of data horizontally and 25 lines vertically. There are some
disadvantages of CRT: Large in Size, High power consumption.
Flat-Panel Display Monitor The flat-panel display refers to a class of video devices that have
reduced volume, weight and power requirement in comparison to the CRT. You can hang them
on walls or wear them on your wrists. Current uses of flat-panel displays include calculators,
video games, monitors, laptop computer, graphics display.

The flat-panel display is divided into two categories: Emissive Displays - The emissive displays
are devices that convert electrical energy into light. Example are plasma panel and LED
(LightEmitting Diodes). Non-Emissive Displays - The Non-emissive displays use optical
effects to convert sunlight or light from some other source into graphics patterns. Example is
LCD (LiquidCrystal Device).
As we move into the future, monitors are still relevant with the devices getting thinner and light
in weight with use of cheaper and cheaper material and reduction in power requirements. The
displaying surfaces are getting bigger and bigger for example with television sets and
touchscreen cellphones. The monitors are no longer serving only as output devices, they are
becoming more of interactive devices with keyboards being displayed on the monitors as is the
case with cellphones and some touchscreen television sets.
b).Printer- In computing, a printer is a peripheral device which produces a hard copy
(permanent readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on
physical print media such as paper or transparencies. . The world's first computer printer was a
19th century mechanically driven apparatus invented by Charles Babbage. In 1953, the first
high-speed printer was developed by Remington-Rand for use on the Univac computer. In 1938,
Chester Carlson invented a dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a
Xerox, the foundation technology for laser printers to come. The original laser printer called
EARS was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center beginning in 1969 and completed
in November, 1971. Xerox Engineer, Gary Stark weather adapted Xerox copier technology
adding a laser beam to it to come up with the laser printer. According to Xerox, "The Xerox 9700
Electronic Printing System, the first xerographic laser printer product, was released in 1977. The
9700, a direct descendent from the original PARC "EARS" printer which pioneered in laser
scanning optics, character generation electronics, and page-formatting software, was the first
product on the market to be enabled by PARC research. According to IBM, "the very first IBM
3800 was installed in the central accounting office at F. W. Woolworths North American data
center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1976." The IBM 3800 Printing System was the industrys first
high-speed, laser printer. A laser printer that operated at speeds of more than 100 impressionsper-minute. It was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography according
to IBM. In 1992, Hewlett-Packard released the popular LaserJet 4, the first 600 by 600 dots per
inch resolution laser printer. In 1976, the inkjet printer was invented, but it took until 1988 for
the inkjet to become a home consumer item with Hewlett-Packards release of the DeskJet inkjet
printer, priced at a whopping $1000. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and
are attached by a printer cable or, in most new printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves
as a document source. Some printers, commonly known as network printers, have built-in
network interfaces, typically wireless and/or Ethernet based, and can serve as a hard copy device
for any user on the network. Individual printers are often designed to support both local and
network connected users at the same time. In addition, a few modern printers can directly
interface to electronic media such as memory cards, or to image capture devices such as digital

cameras, scanners; some printers are combined with a scanners and/or fax machines in a single
unit, and can function as photocopiers. Printers that include non-printing features are sometimes
called multifunction printers (MFP), multi-function devices (MFD), or all-in-one (AIO) printers.
Most MFPs include printing, scanning, and copying among their features. Consumer and some
commercial printers are designed for low-volume, short-turnaround print jobs; requiring virtually
no setup time to achieve a hard copy of a given document. However, printers are generally slow
devices (30 pages per minute is considered fast; and many inexpensive consumer printers are far
slower than that), and the cost per page is actually relatively high. However, this is offset by the
on-demand convenience and project management costs being more controllable compared to an
out-sourced solution. The printing press remains the machine of choice for high-volume,
professional publishing. As we move into the future printers are improving in quality and
performance, many jobs which used to be done by professional print shops are now done by
users on local printers. A virtual printer is a piece of computer software whose user interface and
API resemble that of a printer driver, but which is not connected with a physical computer
printer.

REFERENCE:
https://www.google.co.zw/?gws_rd=ssl#q=future%20display%20technology
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/projections-of-the-future/
https://bus206.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-2-information-systems-hardware/