brief introduction: A ribbon cable (also known as multi-wire planar cable) is a cable with many conducting wires running parallel to each other on the same flat plane. As a result the cable is wide and flat.Ribbon cables are usually seen for internal peripherals in computers, such as hard drives, CD drives and floppy drives. On some older computer systems (such as the BBC Micro and Apple II series) they were used for external connections as well. The ribbon-like shape interferes with computer cooling by disrupting