Shown here is a picture of an a PCI ethernet card.

An ethernet card is what I would consider a short-distance high-speed modem. Ethernet cards are used in homes and offices to set up LANs (or Local Area Networks). In addition, they are used to connect two computers directly together.

Ethernet technology was co-developed by Digital, Intel and Xerox. If you ever see an ethernet card labeled, you will notice it has some kind of descriptive label. The label generally looks something like 10BaseT. This label has two meanings. First, it indicates the speed of data transfer by the "10", which signifies 10MBps. Then, the "T" indicates the distance the cable between the cards can span.

LAN

Hub

Shown here is the picture of a 10-port hub.

  A Hub allows you to connect more than one computer to another. A hub can have any number of ports or connections to other systems. A hub is used mostly for 10baseT networks. Basically, hubs copy the information coming in through one port to the rest of the ports.

Now that you are finished with peripherals continue your education with something else. You say what is that "something else"? Well, I would have to say the next wonderful topic is a take off of peripherals, but that it has its own individual section. So what stores all of the information your computer it needs? It’s storage devices. Please continue with the next section on storage devices.