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PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
July 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

I/O Ports

Input/Output ports (I/O ports) are ranges of addresses that function like mailboxes, allowing programs and components to exchange messages and data. An I/O port has a base address, which is the hexadecimal address of the first byte allocated to that I/O port, and a length, which is also expressed in hexadecimal. For example, many network adapters default to base address 300h and are 20h bytes (32 decimal bytes) long, and so occupy the range 300-31Fh.

There’s no shortage of I/O ports, because thousands exist. We have never seen I/O port conflicts with PCI devices operating in a Plug and Play environment, but I/O port conflicts commonly occur when two ISA devices are unintentionally assigned overlapping ranges. For example, another common base address for network adapters is 360h (range 360-37Fh). Unfortunately, that range overlaps the range of LPT1: (base address 378h), so setting a network card to 360h results in conflicts with the parallel port.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600513XErrata Page