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Why Do Some Modern Computers Still Have Serial Ports?:
While the parallel port is now safely buried in the grave of obsolescence, it may seem odd that the humble, slow serial port is still around. But as it turns out, bit-by-bit, this humble communications port has become essential.
[...] Serial ports are slow with the standard speed at the high end of the range coming in at a pedestrian 115.2Kbps. At that speed, it would take you almost a day to transfer 1GB of data! That's under ideal circumstances, and things can be much, much slower than that.
If we have USB, and serial ports are so slow and comparatively bulky, why the heck do some computers still have them? There are a few reasons, but the most important ones include:
- Lots, and lots, of industrial and scientific equipment are still in service and use serial ports to interface.
- It's simple, reliable, well understood, and much cheaper to implement than other more modern port types.
- Hobbyists have uses, such as programming microcontrollers.
Do you still use the serial port, or do you depend on equipment that does? I have noticed that it is still widely used in medical equipment but are there other fields in which the serial port is the standard interface?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Wednesday March 15, @12:33AM
RS232 was my first project when I was learning about interrupts and wanted to make an ANSI terminal program in MS-DOS. The entire protocol is terribly easy to implement, and I turned the MS-DOS serial software interrupt vector into a hardware interrupt vector in no time at all. I think it took a few hours to implement in Turbo C between research and implementation. It was also my first introduction to ring buffers, which I absolutely fell in love with.
It took me WAY more time to implement the ANSI terminal codes (I don't remember how much time, though) than to implement the RS232 interrupt, and the codes really weren't hard to implement either.