With everything going wireless, we must not forget the old wireless standard using infrared. Many portables, printers, handhelds, and digital cameras have an infrared port on them.
Back in 1993 and 1994 several companies came up with a high-speed, short-range, line-of-sight, point-to-point cordless data transfer standard which they called IrDA. IrDA stands for Infrared Data Association. The IrDA specifications include standards for both the physical devices and the protocols they use to communicate with each other. It was up to the companies whether to adopt the standard in their devices. It took several years, and finally we are there. For example, my 1997 IBM ThinkPad did not use the standard and I had all kinds of trouble trying to get my handheld device to communicate with my portable.
I later replaced my ThinkPad with a Toshiba portable, and now have a device that supports my other devices. I have two Hewlett-Packard printers that support IrDA, and with my HP Jornada and my HP CapShare device, I can walk up to either printer and just point and shoot. Or I can transfer data from my handheld to my portable, and it takes it as well. You may have a Palm device and heard of beaming programs from one Palm to any Palm. Well, you can even beam a contact from a Palm to a Windows CE device and it will accept it, even though they use different operating systems. This is because both devices use the standard IrDA.
My problem was that my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5 had an IrDA port on it but no transceiver pod. Since I am using more and more IrDA devices these days, I wanted the transceiver pod. I got on the Internet and searched for the device.
I discovered that Hewlett-Packard no longer manufactures it. I searched supply houses on the Internet and looked everywhere. I made at least a dozen phone calls. Nothing! So I looked on eBay. Still nothing! I even called the company that manufactured it for Hewlett-Packard. They said it was no longer made and they could not re-manufacture it for one case. Finally I found a refurbished one for about $100.
So a big lesson here is that because of this industry, many things go out of date very quickly. So if you have a new printer made by HP, or for that matter any company, get all the accessories you can, including extra memory, duplex options, IrDA transceiver pods, and maybe even PostScript modules, before you cannot find them anymore.
