Ever wondered why all of your PC’s connectors are weird colours, and who gets to decide what colour is what?
Intrigued by the fact that my old Gateway keyboard (on which I wore out the spacebar after less than a year of use) had an orange connector and my new Dell one had a purple one, and that my microphone connector was a rather effeminate shade of pink, I went in search of the answer. It turns out that the colours are defined by the PC99 standard (careful, it’s 1.5MB of PDF). The standard uses Pantone rather than RGB, so I’ve converted them to a swatch for you.
Connector | Colour name | Pantone | |
---|---|---|---|
Analog VGA | Blue | 661C | |
Audio line in | Light blue | 284C | |
Audio line out | Lime | 577C | |
Digital monitor/flat panel | White | ||
IEE 1394 | Grey | 424C | |
Microphone | Pink | 701C | |
MIDI/Game | Gold | 131C | |
Parallel | Burgundy | 235C | |
PS/2-compatible keyboard | Purple | 2715C | |
PS2-compatible mouse | Green | 3395C | |
Serial | Teal or Turquoise | 322C | |
Speaker out/subwoofer | Orange | 157C | |
Right-to-left speaker | Brown | 4645C | |
USB | Black | 426C | |
Video out | Yellow | 123C | |
SCSI, network, telephone, modem, and so on | None |
So now you know. (Bad Gateway! No cookie!) How does your computer score? Start with 10 points, and subtract one for each incorrectly-coloured connector or plug.
In Gateway’s defense, I would hazard to guess that your old hardware predates the industry-wide standards.
-d
My PC got 7 (or 6, depends) :). USB connector/plug has no color at all, MIDI has yellow color, my speaker plug also has no color at all. Microphone input, well you can’t really, the connector can be configured as mic input, but also as output for rear speakers (if you use a 5.1 sound system).
The only ones that actually matter are the ones where there are different leads with the same connector (e.g. PS/2 keyboard and mouse). Hopefully not many people would try to plug a video cable into their parallel port, or whatever.