Definition of Plug and Play

Plug and play is one of the many anglicisms in computing that literally means "place and use." This tells us immediately that installing new devices has not been an easy task back in the early days of computing.

Today we buy for example an expansion card for our computer, be it an extra video card to be able to play games, a powerful video capture, tuner of TV, etc. we open our PC, place it in its corresponding place and the computer automatically assigns it the "channel" by where your data should pass so that it does not interfere with the data "channels" of other devices that are in the PC. It is as if I assigned one of the multiple highways of the computer so that it can circulate. Once the device is placed inside the computer, the manufacturer of the device provides drivers that make the device functioning video card (for example) can perform with all its power.

This standard should not be confused with another called "Hot plug" or "hot plug" that refers to being able to place a device when the computer is on.

Plug and play is a standard that was created due to the need to be able to offer the public and customers of computers, devices that do not require extra configuration through jumpers (small switches located on the motherboard computers). With plug and play they avoided configurations made by specialists and in the long run they promoted the sale of devices that could be incorporated into the computer.

Going back a bit, the ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus was the first that tried to offer that as soon as we buy an expansion card, we could just put it in and start use. This card placement system still required configurations, however in the market there were PC cards that were promoted in their sale or in the packaging that they were plug and play and this made them attractive to people who did not have much of an IT idea and who wanted to expand their computer.

Various ISA standards were appearing until the technology made the assignment of resources on the computer so Handbook. Standards such as PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) appeared on the market that definitively put an end to manual configuration and made plug and play stay forever. Nowadays, this standard is not even talked about, it is taken for granted that all PC devices are plug and play

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