With composite interfaces in the television and VCR world and RGB based interfaces in computers, there has never been a single direction for the developers. Video has long been the cowboy area of interfacing. What USB had done in the peripheral world by being a standard to connect any type of peripheral to any type of computer, the designers of the HDMI or High Definition Multimedia Interface wanted to do the equivalent in the world of audio and video.

Most connections with these new devices were analog at first with either sending audio or video signals in an analog fashion over a cable, but with increased demands for output quality, and ever increasing speeds of the attached devices, analog was not the way to go anymore. Where in the beginning mainly input and output devices like printers and modems were used, nowadays monitors, speakers and other audio and video equipment are often connected to computers. Since their introduction, computers have slowly changed from academic computing devices to general purpose household appliances.

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