This is not off topic. It deserves a GA

Cheers,

ethobil

I agree!

They are the thingys (or is it thingies?) you plug stuff into on your computer, and nowadays, that other stuff that Ed said.

Zacky, have you met Wiki?

Similar to shipping ports, it's where stuff (data, 1's and 0's) come in and go out.

Ethernet, USB, RS232, Firewire, parallel, IDE, SATA, HDMI etc. are all 'ports'.

Yes those are physical ports.

What about the software ports(more than 10,000 port)

Now a port means any addressable(the computer can talk to it) "thing" that can be used for interchange. So TCP/IP has multitudes of "ports" that are largely just software talking to itself, but data goes in and out of your machine.

I hate typing twice - what exactly did you want to know?

Back in the day, you sent data to a buffer that slapped it electrically onto an output (or reverse this for input). The software (Application) came by periodically and swept the buffer looking for data (again reverse for output).

TCP/IP has bazillions (technical term) of "possible, virtual" ports that do the same thing IF:

There is something "out there" that is going to "listen" to that port number AND if you have some application on your machine that is going to "feed" that numbered port.

So if you go into your router and turn off a port in use, you will not know why, but some application you were using is going to cease working.

Common - because there is no license process - port usages are available on the web. Pick either a port you want to know about or an application you use, and go search up the associated port.