Other disk drives and other peripherals might be specific to a certain manufacturer's standard. For example, many disk drives, printers and mice are specific to one type of personal computer. Such a peripheral built for the Macintosh cannot be used with an Intel-based machine, like a Gateway or a Packard-Bell. Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) is one standard specific to Macintoshes. Though the guts of the disk drive or the printer or the mouse might be identical from one peripheral to the next, their connectors, which is their electrical interface to the world, are built to one standard or another.

In recent years, a new and very fast serial bus, called the Universal Serial Bus or USB, has become standard on most personal computers. It is vendor-independent and standardized so that devices built by many companies can be used on Macs or PCs or UNIX workstations. One great thing about USB is that it permits a tree of connections to be made, not just a daisy-chain, permitting up to 127 devices to be connected to a computer with very fast response time. The data rate on a USB wire is 12 MBps (12 megabits per second) which is faster than the original Ethernet speed of 10 MBps!

Even faster serial buses are available now for extremely data intensive peripherals like videocameras. The Firewire bus is an example of this.