its can have a firewire port. or it can have a extra USB port. most older mother boards have the firewire port however. they are used to plug in gamepads for you gamers out there. gamecontrollers, etc. etc.
Using the com port
Older motherboards often have a VGA port which allow monitors with a VGA cable to connect without the need of a graphics card.
Motherboards anymore usually have: a mouse port (P/S2) a keyboard port (P/S2) a few USB ports a video port (15-pin VGA usually) and some kind of sound (with out, in, and microphone in)
To some extent yes, the motherboard does indeed determine what kind of hard drive to install. Most modern motherboards will have SATA ports for the hard drives. The SATA ports are small in size and are usually labeled as SATA1-SATA4 or however many the motherboard has. You can read it right on the board. Older motherboards, however, used to use PATA or IDE hard drives (PATA & IDE are the same thing but with two different names). An IDE port on a motherboard is about 3-4 times the size of a SATA port. The really old boards may not have the IDE port labeled, but most other motherboards will have the letters IDE (or PATA) written next to the IDE port. If you're referring to a motherboard from the last 5-7 years, the chances are that it has SATA ports. The best thing to do is to look at the motherboard.
LPT1 is a port found on older computers and some newer ones that you can connect a printer to. This port is a female connector with 25 pinholes.
A serial mouse, some older dot matrix printers...
No. I have tried that and it messed up my PS3. DON'T TRY TO DO IT!
Common ports provided by most motherboards are as follows. Serial port (RS-232) Ethernet Port (Network interface) Parallel port. (Not nearly as common any longer) PS/2 Port (Mice and Keyboards) USB Ports (Covers most everything these days) Firewire port (IEEE1394, mostly used for video these days) eSATA Port (External Hard drive or device interface). There are others, but those are your most common ports on standard desktop motherboards. Servers are another story.
Yes you can. USB 3.0 are backwards compatible, well at least most motherboards support it :D
Older type of graphics cards' port
The purpose of a PS/2 port is to provide a connection for a keyboard or mouse to a personal computer.
Thunderbolt ports cannot be added to older MacBook Pros.