A ribbon cable (also called a multi-wire flat cable) is a cable with many wires running in parallel on the same plane. Therefore, the cable is wide and flat. Its name comes from the similarity between it and ribbon.
Ribbon cables are commonly used for internal peripherals of 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 are also used for external connections. The ribbon shape disturbs the airflow in the case and interferes with the heat dissipation of the computer. It also makes the cable awkward to handle, especially when there are many cables; therefore, in the external connection, the round cable almost completely replaces the ribbon cables and are increasingly used internally.
