USB

Stands for "Universal Serial Bus." It's sort of the latest fad in computer ports. If you want, you can use it to replace your mouse, keyboard, serial, parallel, and game ports. In fact, you can daisy chain 127 peripherals to a single USB port and use them all at once. USB is also faster than older ports, supporting data transfer rates of up to 12Mb/sec. Though it was introduced in 1997, the technology didn't really take off until the introduction of the Apple iMac (late 1998) which uses USB ports exclusively. Kinda funny, considering USB was created and designed by Intel, Compaq, Digital, and IBM. Now USB has become a widely-used cross-platform interface for both Macs and PCs.