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Blue Tooth Dongles- Funny Name, Useful Device
By Andrew Kelly

The word β€œdongle” is a funny-sounding term, and in fact seems to be a word that was originally made up. While it sounds silly, the term usually describes a piece of computer equipment, such as a USB flash drive or a blue tooth dongle, which transmits computer signals wirelessly. Once you get over the giggles from saying the word a few times, you might realize that the gibberish word tends to describe rather useful devices.

Dongles As Copy Protection

The original dongle was a small piece of computer hardware that plugged into a place on the computer and was required before certain software would run. Because a program would need the software and a required piece of hardware to run, this made it harder to pirate a program. This was most popular with expensive programs, such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) packages, which are used by engineers and architects to create designs. While this sort of use of dongles was popular with software companies, many computer users weren't fans of such protection methods, since it depended on a piece of hardware that could break or be lost.

Laptop Dongles

It wasn't until laptops gained in popularity that dongles began their evolution into the mobility-enhancing devices that blue tooth dongles are today. Laptop dongles were little cords that plugged into the ultra-thin modem and network cards that went in PCMCIA slots on one end, and had a jack for phone and network cables. This was to allow laptops to access mobile communications at a time when hardware manufacturers just couldn't fit the jacks in the laptops. This was the start of the use of dongles in enhancing mobility. Of course, these cables tended to be fragile, so they aren't use as much anymore, with the advent of wireless technology and laptops that are made with the needed jacks built in.

Present Days: USB And Blue Tooth Dongles

With the advent of USB technology to create plug and play devices that can be plugged in and removed from the computer while it's on, dongles have evolved into more useful items. One of the more common dongles today are USB memory devices, which contain flash memory and can be used like floppy disks, plugging into a USB slot rather than a disk drive.

Finally, a blue tooth dongle looks similar to a USB drive, but rather than store data, it turns a computer into a wireless blue tooth device. The big advantage to a blue tooth dongle is that it ensures that any computer with a USB slot to plug into can become a device capable of connecting wirelessly to blue tooth-enabled printers, cameras, phones, keyboards, and other useful devices. The small size of a blue tooth dongle-about the size of a pack of gum from a vending machine-makes it easily portable. It is the culmination of decades of evolution, and anyone who has made use of these handy little devices with the funny name would agree that dongles are indeed useful things to have around.

Author Details:
Andrew Kelly is a copywriter for various websites including, The A to Z of and Information Junkie.

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