Serial Ports Are STILL Around!

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Learn about the history of the classic serial port and why it's still relevant today!
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[@deadcmyk]

Almost every piece of equipment that keeps trains running or rail crossings activated in my neck of the US still use serial port for almost everything at my job.

[@StRoRo]

I work for telecommunications company and our engineers need laptops with serial ports as most of the nodes still require serial ports for connections

[@deadcmyk]

@@StRoRo we all use the dell rugged series because of the ports as well, i've dropped one off of a work truck on the road and its still kicking

[@KevinArcade87]

If it works it works

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

USB-serial interfaces are cheap enough. The electronics is so simple, it looks like just a cable, the conversion circuitry being hidden in the DE-9 shell.

[@kinnikuzero]

Pos systems also use them

[@aikensource]

1 other very helpful use for COM connections: the technology is really easy to emulate, so virtual COM ports are used on Virtual Machines frequently. If you have control over the hypervisor, it's a super easy and useful way to get terminal access as if you plugged a KVM into it, without having to have working networking.

[@zyeborm]

Heh I once had a bricked VM with some odd file system on it. I needed the configuration out of it to do a restore. I booted the VM into a recovery mode, added a serial port then piped the configuration file to the port and grabbed it on the host by cat > somefile.txt I felt very cool lol. I mean I probably could have loopback mounted the VMs disk and I did try that at first but the partition layout was all screwy and this way felt cooler and in the end isn't that what really matters?

[@aikensource]

@@zyeborm that was also the most "polite" way to do it because you let the OS be in charge instead of touching its storage outside of the runtime environment.

[@kupokinzyt]

I just use my good ole' Windows 95 Boot Disk.

[@Echristoffe]

I am using serial port every day for work. Generally RS-232 or RS-422/485. Those thing rock if you don’t need speed. Cheap, reliable, and you can diy a logic for it…

[@Thommy_99]

Oh yeah with microcontrollers you use these things all the time! Think UART for example

[@kensmith5694]

On the DIY logic side: It is quite easy to make logic that runs from only two bit patterns. 0x80 and 0xFF make two different pulse widths. This is good if you want the computer to turn something on and off with no micro in the device being switched.

[@crashniels]

The serial port is very common in debugging. Some devices still use UART over it AFAIK

[@drewzero1]

The DB9 connectors are a lot easier to solder than some of the smaller ones like microUSB!

[@QuickQuips]

Yep. Rs485 can work over long distances. And you only need 2 wires instead of the ones you need to crimp and shove into an ethernet socket.

[@neeneko]

I think an important distinction is, well, while it can sometimes feel like it, consumer products are not the whole industry. Consumer tech tends to be rapidly changing, unstable, and locked into a constant upgrade cycle that has more 'keeping up with the neighbors' than actual need. Put another way, consumer tech has more in common with the fashion industry than the rest of the tech space. Heh.. though it was kinda odd to single out the serial port as 'the thing you connect everything else with', but frame the parallel port as 'just for printers. Parallel ports were also generic workhorses that were even easier to develop for than serial. You did not even need an api or driver or anything, they just looked like an address in memory.

[@unknownkw]

I love how I could copy a text file to LPT1 to print a document with a single dos command, without any driver as to speak. Those good old days are over.

[@idogaming3532]

@@unknownkw yep. Cuz of oversimplification to make things __look__ nice. Anti-consumerism and capitalism.

[@ironcito1101]

And parallel was a hell of a lot faster than serial. For a long time, it was the best choice for transferring any sizeable amount of data between PCs without a network infrastructure.

[@neeneko]

@@ironcito1101 yep, there is that.. and if it had stayed in use it probably would have gotten faster and faster. In a way, modern super fast setups like external PCI Express is essentially multiple serial lines arrayed in a parallel interface (among other signals). Heh.. though just this weekend I went on an anti-usb rant because I am so tired of USB devices built in different years (or time shifted) not working together. USB and DVI/HDMI are nightmares of long term usage.

[@Qwarzz]

Yep. Industrial applications may have upgrade cycles in decades rather than every couple of years like consumer electronics. Kone Elevators for example still use the AMD Geode from '99 and a motherboard to match.

[@offrails]

Favorite use of the serial port growing up was to link two PCs together (with a null-modem dongle) for quick and reliable DOOM deathmatches before home networks were a thing.

[@kbm2055]

There was a file manager back in the day that let you do this to transfer files between two PCs. It was fine for small files but larger ones could take quite a while.

[@MrJest2]

@@kbm2055 A few of them, actually. I worked for a company who made one that was bundled with millions of laptops of various brands.

[@MrBrad4021]

I did the exact same thing with Doom!

[@AndyK.1]

@@kbm2055 LapLink

[@giulianomarco]

We hooked up two Amiga 500s for a Populous fight in the early 90s - great fun! 😁

[@CrazyNickOO7]

You can thank serial ports for your electricity getting to your house too. Substation engineer here, serial is how all of our relays and sensing equipment talk to each other at substations. Like the video said, they just work. Tens of thousands of dollars of leading edge electronics and they still use a cable and connector designed in the 1960s

[@anujmchitale]

Because serial port protocol is straightforward and hence more robust. Except if we connect it to internet. Then the security flaws come into picture.

[@stephensnell5707]

​@@anujmchitale serial ports are bad and very slow and they do not exist no more either

[@anujmchitale]

@@stephensnell5707 You don't know about embedded systems in this world if you think serial ports don't exist anymore. Why are they bad? Not every form of communication needs blazing speed.

[@stephensnell5707]

​@@anujmchitalewell USB killed off VGA forever and with VGA having been terribly slow speeds it is good it got killed off altogether by USB and when I say VGA no longer exists I am talking truth as it does NOT exist anymore

[@anujmchitale]

@@stephensnell5707 This video is not about the VGA port. It's about the serial printer port. Which runs on the RS-232 or RS-485 protocol. Do you even know about it?

[@Wunderbolts]

RS-232 is still alive and well in cnc machines. A top of the line machine that my job bought in 2019 still has it and I’m certain that the machines we have arriving next month have them to. Although they also have 10mb Ethernet and we almost always that instead.

[@datpudding5338]

Ye, in my last company we got a 5-axis machine - fairly new model and behind the sheet metal: COM everywhere

[@ShinyQuagsire]

UART is still the most reliable way to debug any ARM uC lol, even phones and Macbooks still have them (exposed over SBU pins on USB C or via USB PD shenanigans). Perfect protocol tbh.

[@thebaker8637]

We had like 5 of those big CNC CMMs with like 16 hotswappable probes at an old job I worked. Used them for metrology and validating parts. Serial is super useful, especially when things go to shit at a low level as it happens in industry quite often. Yeah, data rates are slow, but try parsing a gigabit ethernet or even standard USB signal with a scope when you have some weird interference from the power or a nearby machine running screwing everything up. Good luck with that. You can literally decode most serial with just the processor on the scope. The whole thing being barebones, resilient and easy to debug is exactly why it’s in use to this day.

[@frogz]

im rebuilding my laser cutter now and it is usb but at the heart of it, it still uses serial control and commands through a usb chip

[@Papinak2]

@@ShinyQuagsire UART is not a protocol, that's why it's so popular - it only defines the most basic functions for data transfer, so anyone can build whatever protocol they want to fit their needs, while using the same cheap hardware.

[@NikosiaMateas]

I used to work in industrial automation, and you'd be amazed at some of the protocols and equipment still in use... Industrial robots still run on floppy discs and CompactFlash. Mitsubishi PLCs often use coax - yes, like TV coax - for data transmission to certain types of equipment. And even in terms of equipment that's just sort of been grandfathered in, there are still machines in active use today using long-obsolete controllers like the Modicon (ca. 1960s) or PLC5 (ca. 1980s). Unlike tech and IT where it's all about "faster, better," industrial applications are more a "If it ain't broke, for the love of god don't touch it, we have production numbers to meet" mentality.

[@garcjr]

I'm barely starting out in industrial automation but I'm noticing that the automation and IT are pretty merging together. Many of the display units for our PLCs use a form of free DOS and Allen Bradley GDUs still run Windows ME. I would have rather them use Windows 2000.

[@NikosiaMateas]

@@garcjr For tier 1 automotive and similar, definitely. Ethernet is the de facto protocol. For stamping plants in Bumblefuck, TN that have a maintenance staff that couldn't replace a light bulb if they had to, things get a little more... Antique.

[@DVankeuren]

You speak of Modicon as if they went out of business years ago. They are still around and making PLCs.

[@NikosiaMateas]

@@DVankeuren - Modicon controllers are not PLCs. There is a brand called Modicon, but it is simply how Schneider brands their line of PLCs. They are not the same thing as the original Modicon controllers, which pre-date PLCs.

[@mattm3023]

@@garcjr Automation is in a strange state right now. Allen Bradley PLCs having 8 megabytes of memory is a lot, yet Beckhoff's TwinCAT runs on Windows 10 and uses a proprietary object oriented programming language. Same with HMI's, its common to see these 90s looking interfaces running on Windows CE, but then Beckhoff HMI's use modern web server tech for theirs. Im in automation and robotics but have a comp sci background (which is rare), but I think itll be a huge advantage because things are finally beginning to shift into modernity. Much of modern automation software is no longer visualized electrical diagrams, it needs to be much more.

[@gabeklinger648]

I work with an enterprise network, almost all network equipment uses a serial interface for command line /console access. Only difference is they put the serial pinout through a rj45 connector.

[@bscycling6304]

*cough* CISCO *cough* yh I know many other Manufacturers aswell...

[@igooooorrrrr]

Except now we lose the "it just works" aspect of it because no new laptops come with serial ports anymore so you gotta mess with USB-to-Serial adapters.

[@Thats_Mr_Random_Person_to_you]

@@igooooorrrrr true, but they are a dime a dozen, have good driver support, and (importantly) not the responsibility of the manufacturer of the device you want to hook up to. They dont need to do any investment of any kind in drivers or software. Just present serial interface and thats it.

[@christophernugent8492]

Some take it a step further and expose a USB port that is internally connected to a UART serial communication chip. So, when you plug the other end into a computer, it gets recognized as a Serial COM controller.

[@nathanielhill8156]

​@@igooooorrrrr fun fact, most computers still have serial ports, the headers just aren't suffered on to the motherboard

[@robomonkey896]

In my line of work (Railway) here in the UK, serial/COM ports are used in 99% of the hardware used to run and regulate the railway. I find it interesting because, whilst the technology is superceded by newer technologies, it still beats them because of the reliability / data configuration it provides. Theres also RS-422 for data transmission over longer distances.

[@zeronxepher]

Oddly enough, one of my Japanese rhythm game arcade machine still uses serial ports. The PC that it has is a bit more modern but has a serial port for the controller that the game uses. I guess Sega loves Serial.

[@EthanCGamer]

Serial is still all over arcade games, but slowly being replaced by USB. The machines designed in Asia still use them quite a bit, but the US and European machines are switching to USB connectivity, or even SD card to store firmware.

[@drewzero1]

Sega and Atari both also used the DB9/DE9 connector as a controller port on home consoles (notably Genesis and VCS/2600) though not as an RS-232 compatible serial port.

[@zeronxepher]

@@EthanCGamer a lot of the other rhythm arcade games often time have custom io boards for their controllers.

[@Ahfeku]

My old chinese speaker which my parents bought it at year 2000 ish perhaps has the subwoofer linked to a serial port. I thought it was vga at first but the pins are different.

[@zushikatetomotoshift1575]

@@Ahfeku then it's not the same type of cable.

[@coolbrotherf127]

I worked at an AV company for a few years and actually had to solder together some custom DB9 connectors to connect older electronics to the network. You'd be surprised at how many electronics can still use RS-232 to connect to computers.

[@bandbigred]

Knew it wouldn’t take long before coming across someone from the AV industry. I’ve assembled some db9 connectors but the thought of soldering, ewwwww

[@juri14111996]

@@bandbigred d-sub9 for serial is a plesure, one 3 pins needet. d-sub 25, used for 8 balanced, analog audio channels (or 16 digital) is a pain.

[@233kosta]

All of our materials testing equipment is serial, so is a bunch of data logging equipment I'm currently working on. The bench PSU too, with more options over serial than using the buttons. Hell, I even turn my projector on and off over RS232! When I was growing up it was always seen as some scary ancient thing that nobody understood, COM ports were a mystery beyond comprehension... Now that I've seen how easy it is (in linux I can literally just echo shit into the interface!) I'm absolutely kicking myself for not learning about it sooner.

[@the_1drummajor]

My old job was that way too when we were working with old-school Crestron 2-Series equipment. I soldered a couple cables but in my time, most of the DB9s were dismantled because we were upgrading and using more modern newer equipment that relied on HDBaseT

[@coolbrotherf127]

@@the_1drummajor HDbaseT is really useful since it can send commands and video signal together. The old system of having to sync the video source and video display with the RS-232 commands was prone to a lot of weird issues.

[@SRC267]

Speaking of old connectors I recently upgraded my CD-ROM drive that had the very old IDE data cable with a Molex plug, to SATA power and data cables. Even the PSU needed to be upgraded.

[@samoksner]

Like a 40 pin cable... Not even a fancy 80 pinner?

[@potapotapotapotapotapota]

Eww ribbon cables, that brings back memories.

[@vasopel]

You could have just bought an adapter,that is what I did, there where only two sata connectors on my motherboard (that are already used) so my DVD drive is using an adapter to connect to the pata on the motherboard,works great for three years now ;-) edit:forgot to mention that the adapter takes care of the power too,it takes molex power and gives it to the sata DVD drive ;-)

[@darkstorminc]

I still have a working computer that uses ide cables lol

[@MariuszChr]

@@potapotapotapotapotapota good old razor blade hack to improve case airflow...

[@darken878]

They are still very much alive in the offshore industry too. Screw terminal serial connectors are your best friend for low bandwidth data transmission in applications where cables are likely to get tugged or vibrate free on a regular basis.

[@stephensnell5707]

Serial VGA is not alive anymore,USB killed it off for good(as soon as USB existed VGA was killed off entirely)

[@benjaminbordelon8413]

In the education space, RS-232 is still ubiquitous when it comes to controlling media systems in rooms, ie projectors, tvs, etc

[@lunakoala5053]

Well, their equipment is usually straight out of the 90ies anyway.

[@pabloescobar9337]

Or getting data from scoreboards!

[@bigbubba0439]

Yup. I've seen those older ports on projectors with component, dvi, vga (might not be the exact ones, but look pretty similar), and some others. Been a bit since I've taken a look at them, though

[@wellenwerk3357]

Ive installed many big Barco and Christy projectors over the last 10 years. Rs232 for remote controlling, power on/off is still the prefered way instead of doing it via Network

[@lojtnantsaarnio362]

Cisco uses it today aswell

[@tylerpeppy1450]

To be honest, I laughed so hard when I saw the title of the video. RS-232, RS-485, UART (TTL); are some of the most abundantly used low-speed industrialized buses. These have always been around and I don't understand why people think they left...

[@crushermach3263]

I mean if you've never used one yourself you might be forgiven for thinking older technology just kind of fades away in favor of new standards.

[@tylerpeppy1450]

@@crushermach3263 No. I use them for embedded systems all the time. I'm under the IMPRESSION that older hardware seems to fade with time; as have multiple standards.

[@erlendse]

And they better stay around too. USB is a complex beast, and a UART just sends and recieves with no questions asked.

[@bradleythatcher2869]

I work for a company here in the US that makes rugged Windows and Android tablets for data collection and rough environments. We still put serial ports on all our devices. It’s a must.

[@TheDaNuker]

Ah, I still remember the days of buying a null modem cable (basically a serial to serial cable with a cross) just to play Quake 2 1v1. It's definitely one of the legacy connectors that aren't going away yet, a USB to Serial Port dongle is still a very important accessory to have for backend IT teams.

[@chrisl8292]

Same! Except our first use of the massive serial cable in the dorms was for 1v1 Duke Nukem games! With Quake coming out later in the year.

[@DVankeuren]

I remember making lots of null modem cables at work.

[@MrDgwphotos]

Cisco Rollover cables.

[@savagepro9060]

Techquickie has been focusing on PORTS lately!

[@divyam._.maheshwari]

Yeah true 😅

[@NineEyeRon]

That ship hasn’t sailed yet

[@divyam._.maheshwari]

@@NineEyeRon What does that mean sir?

[@EfficientTrout]

Gotta teach the youngin 😊

[@savagepro9060]

@@divyam._.maheshwari meaning -->> it is still relevant

[@m3lod1an]

I work in enterprise audio manufacturing and we use RS232 for all of our JTAG/pretest and firmware loading, and the ports come standard on all our servers as hard (non-networked) access to their command-line interface

[@Abovan79]

Shout out to all of my data center nerd that configure IP and san switches, so we carry usb-to-serial adapters with us everywhere we go. Some of the fancy ones go Bluetooth to serial for wireless Cisco switch config fun!

[@TheRiddleNL]

No noth fun, dose dongles are hell :(

[@Zippytez]

Dont you dare say Cisco switch coding. In HS, I took an IT class that had a unit on it. God the horrors of bs'ing your way through that. No one in the class knew what they were doing with the code interface

[@Demache92]

Serial really is a true standard. It was so ubiquitous on 70s and 80s PCs that beyond a few quirks here and there, they will have zero problems talking to modern PCs. Its fun using an Apple II as a terminal for a relatively modern 40 core Linux server using nothing more than a serial cable and terminal emulation software on the Apple II side. Quite literally, a super computer as far as its concerned.

[@sinni800]

I once found out serial controllers can actually break quite easily. I got a PS/2 mouse and plugged it into my serial port using an adapter (and yes, that adapter was meant for that). It fried the serial controller on the mainboard. I put in a serial card... and it fried that too. Another serial controller... and I let it go, I just used my serial mouse again

[@jackjohnson1186]

My favorite thing is PLC companies that flip 2 pairs so you have to by their cable.

[@sinni800]

@@jackjohnson1186 Reminds me of cisco and their fucking console cables

[@James_Knott]

You wouldn't say that if you actually worked with serial ports back then. They were anything but standardized.

[@afre3398]

The serial port is also popular in the home brew micro controller world. As it is very simple to program an interface to a PC. In cases there you need low speed data transfer rates. But I have also seen devices that can support up to about 1 Mega bits pr second. Not sure how good the signal integrity is at those speeds though

[@ailivac]

Oh it would be fine over short/medium distances at 1MHz; you wouldn't see transmission line effects until tens of meters. Noise is usually the bigger issue if you're running it longer than across a room but that's where differential interfaces like RS-422/485 come in.

[@donaldroehrig7817]

I see serial ports daily. Scanners, manufacturing equipment, etc. Yeah, when it costs millions of dollars to upgrade your equipment and it still works well, you keep using that old technology as long as you can. We still keep a few old laptops around that run Windows 95 because they have serial ports and the software that runs on them is no longer available for servicing the machines.

[@EmptyZoo393]

I worked with an x-ray panel at one job, and we had an old system that ran windows 95 connected to the laser scanner that we used. Turns out you could log onto the system by hitting the x on the login page for the system, no username or password required. I've also heard rumors about semiconductor fabs still using hordes of 80x86 chips as controllers.

[@donaldroehrig7817]

@@EmptyZoo393 Yes, you have to make sure if you use old technology that it is secure. Our systems that use older tech cannot connect to the network/internet and you would have to physically open a locked cabinet and connect via a serial cable to get access. None store sensitive data. They are used for system controls on individual manufacturing machines.

[@soundspark]

Do the machines not talk well to USB serial ports?

[@donaldroehrig7817]

@@soundspark Some of the equipment is simply so old that USB as we know it today was not even invented, yet. It still works fine, so no reason to spend $10's of thousands if not $100s of thousands to upgrade it. No ROI. Successful business is all about the return on investment.

[@soundspark]

@@donaldroehrig7817 I meant those converters from USB to RS-232.

[@IronwingTechHaven]

A lot of modern PCs actually do still have serial port connectors on their motherboards.

[@wellenwerk3357]

Yes, i got Mainboard for Mediaserver/Projection application use. It has 7 serial Ports

[@chaos.corner]

I used one to upgrade a PC a while back. Windows wouldn't recognize the USB ports on the PC and no PS2 ports so I used a serial mouse and screen keyboard to get the drivers updated.

[@cpK054L]

I have YET to see any mobo after 2005 have an RS-232 port.... I have to use an FTDI cable and those aren't cheap.

[@chaos.corner]

@@cpK054L My last motherboard from 2020 was a B550M-K. Comes with 1xCOM port onboard. This isn't the one I was referring to earlier so that's 2.

[@cpK054L]

@@chaos.corner I saw the motherboard on Amazon... and when showing the peripheral panel... there is no DB-9 jack on it.... are you lying to me? Looks like a DE-15... which is not a common connector for RS-232/RS-485

[@jacobdrj101]

I work with manufacturing metrology/statistics software... We use serial ports (and virtual serial ports) ALL THE TIME... Old standards never die... They just fade slowly away... The fact that they are so simple from an electrical standpoint is a huge feature too...

[@ihaveacoolhat1]

We still use them in datacentre environments to configure PDUs, generators and gain terminal access.

[@TheCoolDave]

I work TV broadcast, in IT, we use a ton of serial cables to automate things. We just use the ports to control things, and when you try to make things moron proof, it does help. It's all slowly moving over to IP based but, a lot of the older stuff uses it and we almost forget about them because they are so reliable...

[@FixitFred]

I was surprised when this video did not mention the use of serial for console cables even to this day they are still widely used by cisco, aruba, ruckus, juniper etc.

[@astrawby]

When I read console cables, I thought of Atari and Sega first, but good point indeed!

[@DETERNET]

I’m a broadcast engineer working for one of the major equipment manufacturers, all of our products have serial connectivity for setup even though one of them it’s essentially a specialized network switch designed for passing SMPTE 2110, on 400Gbps ports. Some have added usb as well but I keep my serial adaptor handy in my gear bag

[@stevenclark2188]

Also, one of the big classic uses for a serial port was the mouse. PS/2 ports were for expensive IBMs for years until ATX board became standard. AT motherboards of compatibles as late as K6-2 processors often had an AT keyboard port and ran the mouse over serial.

[@DragonGrafx-16]

I have a PC with a Slot 7 motherboard with a K6 (first generation, not the 2) that does have the AT keyboard port, but it has a PS/2 mouse port installed using riser card. I use it to play games for MS-DOS.

[@PaulSorensen5]

DB-9 is actually a commonly misused term, they're supposed to be called DE-9 ports but over time people consistently referred to them as DB-9 after coming from DB-25 ports, but the B stands for what shell size the port is.

[@RamiKattan]

The video should have mentioned the importance of RS-232 in networking equipment, which most of them is still configured over serial port. Even when new switchers seem to have an RJ45 configuration port, in reality that RJ45 cable is an RJ45-to-serial cable. Just last week our fiber provider came to change some configurations on the Fiber Router and used a serial cable and telnet to do so.

[@bennylloyd-willner9667]

RJ-45 to serial is not really necessary, since RJ-45 signals are serial already. I do get what you mean, serial as RS-232 is another standard of serial so some conversion is needed if you want to connect an RS-232 thingomabob to it😁

[@TheSeriph]

I used to have an older laptop from work just for this reason. Until I found a reliable USB to serial adapter. The sys admin was kinda suprised when I turned in the old system.

[@zyeborm]

Rj-45 to serial is mostly a Cisco thing. These days the console port is frequently a USB to serial port built into the device so you don't need to bring your own then find out it's incompatible because it uses a knockoff chip.

[@roberthoffmann8043]

@@zyeborm At least the cisco FP Firewalls have both Rj-45 and mini USB to Serial. They also come with a mini USB to USB-A cable so you can connect the firewall directly to your pc an communicate via serial.

[@Milnoc]

We use DIGIs a lot in my line of work which are equipped with RJ-45 ports wired for RS-232 and not Ethernet. Makes it very easy to wire a bunch of serial devices with just Ethernet cables and RJ45 to DB9/DB25 adapters. We have sites where the Ethernet jacks in the walls are actually RS-232 jacks. To avoid wiring errors and handshaking problems, I open up the adapters, pull out most of the wires and wire up only the red, green and yellow pins for communications. We avoid hardware handshaking whenever possible.

[@TTim4]

wow 56k modem dang that is fast ... my first modem was a whole 50 baud, then I got to upgrade to a 300 let me tell you watching text move almost as fast as I could read was awesome, & then I got fancy with a 1200 and finally text could go across the screen faster than I could read, well when it was working at full speed anyway.

[@megachonk9440]

I got a modem when 2400 was the cutting edge. Nobody else in my town had ever even heard of such technology and most thought it was crazy stuff to be able to connect to remote computers over a phone line. I was like a tech god to my friends.

[@shorty808100]

I had a 9800 baud modem back in 1990 it would DL at 2.4kbs a 5600 baud would only DL at like around 1.4kbs, where as 56k could do around 14+kbs my 28.8k connection would do 5-6kbs

[@handlesarefeckinstupid]

I can hear the handshake protocol now. I used an acoustic coupler for a while, messing about on BBS sites.

[@cpK054L]

@@shorty808100 *9800 Baud.... you're a liar. Baudrates seem to have been multiples after 300 BAUD. Did you mean 9600?

[@XzTS-Roostro]

I work at an Amazon sort center (opened since 2017), and the desktop label printers, made by Zebra Technologies Corp., has a combination of USB, Parallel, and RJ-47 ports.

[@LSD97123]

Back in 2006, my dad bought a Lenovo flip phone called E307. The data cable came with it had a DB9 port on one end. When he bought a new phone around 2010, he gave it to me and I had the liberty of exploring its depths. I installed the PC suit, came on a mini disc on my pentium 4 PC, and connected the phone through said cable. I could send texts through my computer. Also, there was a function to connect the computer to internet through phone, but I could never get it figured out. Those days were fun. We had extremely limited resources, yet we managed to get things done and find happiness in what we had.

[@oneguy1987]

when i was little in the 90s, my dad cleaned my room and moved my desk/computer and instead of unscrewing the connectors he just ripped them out!

[@Ganara426]

Wow thats horrible

[@Jpeg6]

Another benefit of serial ports is that they could be interrupt driven which is helpful for time critical applications. I have a serial GPS receiver they gives PPS outputs to microsecond accurate time for my NTP server. USB has buffers so timing can be off.

[@khx73]

Ohhh that feeling when you realize you're just not in the target demographic anymore.

[@suttonshow]

They're very much alive in the broadcast industry! We use them for tallies, UMDs, general control and sometimes even Comms when it comes to interfacing with radio systems and older equipment, and there's no complaints here, d-Sub 9 is really easy to solder and it just works

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

2:13 Also for connecting to minicomputers from DEC and other manufacturers. While IBM preferred a faster, more complicated (and more expensive) proprietary protocol for its 3270-family terminals.

[@RaymondHng]

IBM 3270-type terminals and printers were connected to 3274 cluster controllers using coaxial cable at a rate of 2.3587 Mbit/sec. The 3274 cluster controllers were then connected to the IBM mainframe computer. IBM 3270 terminals were not directly connected to the mainframe. The main goal of the system was to maximize the number of terminals that could be used on a single mainframe. To do this, the 3270 was designed to minimize the amount of data transmitted, and minimize the frequency of interrupts to the mainframe. By ensuring the CPU is not interrupted at every keystroke, a 1970s-era IBM 3033 mainframe fitted with only 16 MB of main memory was able to support up to 17,500 3270 terminals.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@RaymondHng Block mode may be efficient for data entry, not so good for timeshared interactive applications.

[@PrajjalakChattopadhyay]

Physicist here. Many of our scientific instruments are still using serial communication over USB. We have FTDI FT232 or CH340 breakout boards for that. RS-232 or UART communication is slow, but reliable and robust. For high speed high data volume applications, we use TCP or UDP over Ethernet in our lab. Most of these equipment are designed by us in house.

[@Thats_Mr_Random_Person_to_you]

I think you hit it on the head with cheap implementation. UART hardware (ie the ICs, the logic, and the peipheral silicon area on microcontollers / SOCs) is just so 'simple' and the end user doesn't need drivers (another thing that could 'break'). For some hardware its 'useful' life is beyond that of the development cycles of OSs so using UART for your 'recovery access' (as with the likes of Network switches) is a no-brainer as you don't need to maintain device drivers as all OSs have software that can run serial tty etc.. They are also a more robust connection method. Its very very very hard to physically break an d-sub connector (ie the actual interface port on the device) which is perfect for industrial areas as well. And again, as you say, if you dont NEED high data throughput, then its an appropriate tool for the job.

[@BastetFurry]

You can even bitbang serial in a pinch, it's what the C64 does for its serial ports because they botched a chip revision and the hardware serial was broken. ^^'

[@zyeborm]

I dunno about physically hard to break, you ever see somebody plug a VGA cable (same dimension as the DB9) into an IEC socket? I have, and I've gotten the tech support call to fix the "broken" computer

[@nahco3994]

That is so true. I first ran into UART when I was playing around with bare-metal programming on an OG Raspberry Pi. I was looking for things to do with it other than making an LED blink. And there it was: an incredibly simple way to make a Raspberry Pi send text output to somewhere else **without the help of an operating system** How cool is that?

[@davidjohnston4240]

When there's a microprocessor at the other end, RS232/485 is ok because it can parse and response to that byte stream. For lower level hardware, we (I.E. people like me that design chips) prefer I2C/I3C/JTAG etc, because the transactions over the wires can map directly to register reads and writes. It's all cheap and easy, but easy is relative.

[@anujmchitale]

@@davidjohnston4240 I recently experienced this. My prior job was from embedded system applications and now changed to Semicon industry. My go-to would be the serial port communication while everyone at Semicon prefers the JTAG. Now I am using JTAG for communicating with the chips.

[@buffuniballer]

Use them almost daily to connect to a server's "Lights Out Management" port when I'm in the data center fixing issue. I typically don't have access to the customer network, so access to the server management functions via a serial port is a good separation between the technician and the production data. They are also used to initially set up devices. Someone has to put the LOM and switches and other devices on the network, so the LOM's serial port, the switch or router console is used for initial configuration. Serial ports get a workout in datacenters around the world.

[@davideaezakmi9530]

If you work in a research enviroment you can still see these cables everwhere. It's not uncommon to see a machine that cost half a million dollars hooked up to an ancient PC with Windows XP through a serial port

[@daniel_lucio]

In the 90's I specialized in making serial cables for graphing calculators (Texas and HP), I also made Linux scripts to communicate with them using Kermit from Columbia University, I even made a serial cable for my LX300 dot matrix printer because it worked better on that port when Windows switched from 3.11 to 95.

[@RolandHutchinson]

Kermit was the always-available last resort -- and often the "first resort" solution of choice -- for moving either text or binary files between disparate operating systems and architectures.

[@marksterling8286]

Loved the video, although made me feel old, i had a usr hst modem, the palmpilot pro and an x10 home automation controler. it university i had a homemade null modem cable running between rooms using 3 core cable and looping rts-cts dsr-dtr, i also remember having to get an additional 2 port card because i ran out of ports (@ that time my mouse was serial) and i needed a uart16550 as the uart8550 struggled to keep up

[@rushthezeppelin]

I work in home energy efficiency inspections and use a device called a manometer that is basically a fancy device for measuring pressure. The older digital model of them has a serial port and the newest model which has WiFi and now Bluetooth built in only came out in 2016. About half the manometers in my company are still the old model and there's still a ton of them floating around in the industry at large. The ports were used to connect little modules that do various tasks, the one used the most giving it WiFi connecting ability to communicate with your computer.

[@vipr642]

Can verify that industrial equipment uses antiquated ports. A while back I was using a CNC machine in a welding shop and in order to get the software to tell the machine how to cut the metal it used a parallel port of all things. The modern Dell Optiplex PC I was using needed a PCIe card to give it a parallel port. I guess it uses parallel and not serial because it is more similar to a printer in application.

[@rashidisw]

Using expansion card to add Parallels & Serials port was how it used to be done, before the built-in onboard alternative became trendy and takes over. But since more modern motherboards no longer provides those, we back using expansion card yet again.

[@xpwn3rx]

I work for a hospital system and spent years hooking up brand new medical devices with serial ports. They can be temperamental, and some manufacturers do things like making them not send data if a certain pin is connected. Many vendors also use different non-standard pinouts.

[@toshineon]

I find it interesting that there's often such a disconnect between consumer and industrial technology. It's harder to convince a company why they need a new piece of tech, especially if it follows different standards, than a typical consumer.

[@bandbigred]

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it’s cheaper to use, easier to configure and easier to upkeep, why change

[@FlorenceSlugcat]

Quite often, there is just no need at all to upgrade something. For example, if you have a machine that needs to transfers 1kbps of data to a computer, there is no reason at all to waste money and labour on replacing the ports and cables on the device for a cable capable of 10gbps A cable capable of 10kbps will do just as good as a 10gbps in that case.

[@mortenhattesen]

Back in the 1970s and 1980s terminals (display and keyboard) were connected to a host (typically mini computers) using a serial RS232 port, possibly via a modem. It wasn't until the IBM PC in the 1980s that the DB9 connector was introduced. Before then, the DB25 connector was THE RS232 serial connector. The stated 75 bps speed was only present in the 1200/75 bps modems, where the 75 bps part was used for transmitting keystrokes - 7.5 keystrokes per second was deemed sufficient - leaving the remaining bandwidth of 1200 bps for receiving characters to display. Prior to the display terminals were the mechanical teletypes (typewriters) during the 1960s and 70s, that often operated at 300 bps (roughly 30 characters per second). Without any busy-handshaking, it was up to the host computer to pause after sending carriage-return and line-feed characters to allow for the printing head and roller to move before being able to print any further characters. That was achieved by configuring how many null characters (that were ignored by the teletype) had to be sent after a CR/LF character.

[@charlesschneider7079]

Before there were PS-2 mice, there were serial mice. More fun was writing the config.sys file to keep the serial ports from clashing by using the same interrupt request (IRQ).

[@Sembazuru]

When I went to college in the early '90s with my Amiga there was only other person on my residential hall had a computer. His was a PC (I honestly forget if it was an actual IBM or a clone). He was jealous of the native Amiga sound system so he got a soundblaster board and lost his mouse to an IRQ conflict when he installed the soundblaster.

[@handlesarefeckinstupid]

Ah IRQ conflicts, so many hours poking about the bios and config files. Good times.

[@NickNackGus]

The funny thing is, they're not gone from modern PCs either - except for maybe compact motherboards, you'll often find a COM header on modern motherboards. You can get a cheap adapter that's nothing more than a cable that connects to a PCI slot without using the PCI connector and use it to talk to your favorite microcontrollers or single board computers.

[@redmcbeard4230]

In the world of PLCs (Programable Logic Controller) Serial ports are still standard.

[@andrewslejska4205]

Really? I wouldnt say standard but common. Not much new serial equipment from what i see although that could just be the industry im in.

[@garcjr]

We're upgrading some of our PLC equipment to work on some sort of industrial ethernet. But it'll be a while before everything's converted. Afterall PLC stands for Please Leave Connected.

[@redmcbeard4230]

@@andrewslejska4205 serial and some kind of PoE Ethernet are king in 90% of the PLC and dedicated controllers. PoE only is becoming standard with Allen Bradley systems but there is always a backup Serial Com in the panel. Nearly all the experienced programmers I know in my industry (food production and ammonia cooling systems) trust Serial Coms over Ethernet. The younger folks are less likely to crack open a panel with Wi-Fi modules becoming integrated in those fancy HMI/PLC bundles.

[@redmcbeard4230]

@@garcjr 100% true. Everything is Ethernet these days but a TON of PLCs still have the serial com integrated because it may be slow… but it damn near never fails. Unlike every other freaking Ethernet patch cable my company purchases.

[@andrewslejska4205]

@@redmcbeard4230 interesting to know. In my job i only use allen bradley so maybe as my career develops i'll see and have to get more used to dealing with serial connections. I think with the increase of data connections and importance of central data storage especially for alarm data, tracking of more and more complex diagnostics and potential for off site diagnostics ethernet will probably get more popular especially as schools are teaching more about ethernet connections then the older standards.

[@kahelsoro]

RS-232 is still very much alive, even in modern Network equipment. Where I work; I always have Serial-based cables with me. Though the port has changed from the typical DB9 to most commonly RJ45 the backend IS still Serial. Some even have USB Mini-B connectorts BUT the backend is still Serial Personal Advise: If you're looking for USB(Male) to RSR232(Male) connectors; go with the Mahattan brand; i've been using it for years (10 years) and they have never failed. Just dont forget to install your drivers AND make sure to buy the correct IC(most common and which is what I use for my type of work is PROLIFIC)

[@JesseBrohinsky]

Even some devices that use USB might actually be still implementing the serial protocol. I've worked on some software that used serial for all communications with an embedded hardware device. Nice and simple and reliable.

[@jg374]

An example of this is Arduino boards.

[@ozzman530]

As a network engineer, serial ports are still the #1 go to, to fix networking equipment via the console port. Heck straight out of the box console ports via serial connections is how you do it.

[@OmahaGTP]

As a network guy, I can’t express how much I loathe usb-to-serial adapters. They are garbage. All drivers are garbage. That may be more of an insult to garbage.

[@JeffDeWitt]

Agreed. We had a bunch of those and I've gradually been replacing them with PCIe serial adapter cards.

[@KokoroKatsura]

wat do they do?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

You need drivers for them? I just plug them into a Linux box and they work.

[@JeffDeWitt]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 A lot of devices don't play nice with Linux.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@JeffDeWitt A lot of them *do* run Linux. I’ve been doing stuff with some Sierra Wireless 3G/4G modems, for example. Plug them in via USB, and they make the connection look like its own TCP/IP LAN.

[@dontown1531]

I was an Alpha-tester for the ARPANET in 1969. They brought a Telex machine to our High school in Vancouver & hooked it up with an old telephone handset & acoustic modem & sent an 'e-mail' to SFU.

[@andrewslejska4205]

Industrial uses are switching to ethernet. Gigabit is becoming common even but there is still plenty of rs 232 plugs and other serial communications. Aged serial connections get annoying to troubleshoot.

[@MikeBramm]

Yes, LOTS of industrial equipment still have at least one serial port (PLCs, scales, scanners, printers, lifts, stackers, bundlers, sorters, purshers, fillers, shrink wrappers, etc.).

[@savagepro9060]

I think Cisco equipment might still be using serial ports. I'm not sure!

[@mhm4me]

Cisco routers and switches still use serial ports till day

[@savagepro9060]

@@mhm4me Damn! I knew it

[@Plexico41522]

a lot of commercial network equipment has serial ports that is the only way to do initial setup, most once they are setup you can telnet in to them to change settings.

[@edg4rallanbro753]

Yes, I got to play with a switch and you can get into the console by either using serial port or RJ45 to serial. The solution I used because my laptop doesn't have either of those is RJ45 to serial to USB type A to USB type C, still worked in putty with some driver updates.

[@James_Knott]

@@mhm4me Some use USB & built in serial port adapter.

[@Milnoc]

I automate truck scales. The scale indicator, receipt printer and Wago Modbus industrial controller all use RS-232. It just simply works and is not prone to massive failures or electrical interference like USB and computer networks would experience in an industrial setting. It's also less costly when you consider the Ethernet option for our devices costs about $100 extra per device and often requires a laptop to set it up. With RS-232, you usually have DIP switches, and that's only changed if the default values of 9600,N,8,1 aren't good enough. We activate software handshaking for printers only so that there's no buffer overflow. No other device requires handshaking because the data flow involves very short on-demand commands and responses. That allows us to cut down the number of pins required for communications down to three (send, receive, ground).

[@alkoyyy]

Serial ports need a comeback! Every connection that requires a handshake is garbage...

[@leonmoto1931]

It's also really easy to implement, since every language has solid and easy libraries for serial communication

[@travisstoia4627]

not first but we move

[@austinbowles2000]

I spent a summer as an AV Technician and we used RS232 for a lot of control systems, especially surrounding video and projectors.

[@troyBORG]

I remember having a Serial mouse, and I remember having to install the drivers for dos, so when I log out of win3.1 back into dos to play games it would work.

[@Deadeye313]

Many things that keep ships running use serial ports. From generator controllers to wind sensors. They are used for monitoring and configuration.

[@it4offices]

we often use a serial cable to setup network switches and routers when they arrive. Some newer devices that come with USB connectors still emulate a serial port so it maybe quite a while before we see them go.

[@zynan]

Please do a video about SCSI ports! Zip drives, music equipment, expensive gadgets of the 1990’s… oh the nostalgia!

[@ChipLinck]

I connect medical devices to electronic medical records (EMR), and the two primary methods I use are Ethernet, and serial ports. In the OR, I connect anesthesia machines, patient monitors, lab devices, heart lung machines, cardiac output machines, and other devices to an appliance called a Capsule Neuron through serial ports. The Neuron is a tablet sized PC connected to the network and sends the data to a server that processes the data and sends HL7 messages to our EMR. Some devices are slow at only 9600 baud. In addition to speed, we also have to set the parity, stop and data bits. They have to match on the machine, and the port on the Neuron. It's not hard, and it rarely fails. If it does stop, it usually just needs a device restart to reinitiate communication. By far there are more problems on the network or software side.

[@o_puff4949]

I think we should get a refresh of CAT cable… maybe a “how to” video with all the specifications/use cases of CAT 3 all the way to 7A. Dig into POE, POE+ & POE+ max.. Might be a bit much for TQ, but in my line of work, CAT cable is taking over a lot more responsibility than data transfer

[@o_puff4949]

Last “ethernet” video I had seen from the channel was from 9 years ago🫣

[@zodayn]

I work in a greenhouse where we use scizor lifts for all kinds of functions. Those lifts have serial ports on them to connect various devices like fans, sprayers, thermometers and IR distance sensors. All super basic data that pretty much all boils down to stop the sprayer when the IR sensor says the distance limmit is reached. And the great thing is that these connectors are screwed in tightly and work in a warm and wet environment. When entering the greenhouse I put my phone in a special case that blocks the USB port and speakergrills because else the ports would rust and erode and build up gunk and water that it breaks within a month. Not with serial ports. Those lifts have been running the same cables for 20 years now.

[@fish_bacon]

Serial is still relevant in business applications, and any work laptop with an inbuilt serial port gets a +1 from me, and USB dongle serial drivers are a nightmare sometimes.

[@IanHobday]

Serial is still super common. Old school connections were DB25 instead of DB9. Later high speed ports ran up to 230,400bps but 115,200bps is still often the max.

[@ailivac]

GPS receivers. CNC controllers (including 3D printers). Test equipment. Two-way radio programming cables. Microcontroller bootloaders (Arduino among others). Drone telemetry radios. Management ports on routers. Anything (especially outside the consumer space) that doesn't need very fast speeds, or can't justify the complexity of a whole network stack to use Ethernet, uses a serial port either directly or through some emulation layer, commonly on top of USB. The circuitry for it is in virtually every embedded processor so it's trivial to integrate into almost anything that needs to talk to a computer.

[@renegade637]

We have some layer 3 switches that use the serial port to configure ports to work on separate virtual LANs. We were using it that way for a while until the reason for having virtual LANs was no longer necessary.

[@lrayzor]

We still use them for scales, both industrial and lab sized, capturing weights into our computer system along with colour matching devices for pass/fail testing.

[@MrCommodorebob]

In the data center they are essential for both servers and networking equipment. If something goes wrong and you can't access your server / switch any other way, chances are you can get to the serial console to see what's wrong and possibly fix it.

[@TheGaggenau]

I work with AV integration and I use serial on a daily basis. For example Serial is not affected by strange power saving functions in equipment that’s needed to fulfill TCO standards or strange security measurements on networks that only allows the original MAC address so when you change equipment it stops working.

[@bryanb3352]

The deeper you go in electronics, the more important serial communication is. Being able to send bits to something else one after the other in a reliable way is essential. And there are ways to do that without and without a shared clock.

[@l3v1ckUK]

I don't think I ever used the serial ports on my home PC, but we did used to use them at work for connecting to a battery of sensors on site.

[@manofwill2468]

I work for an av company and we use the serial port to control devices power on/off and control in general for certain services.

[@AdithaJayasuriya]

They are used in my hospital to "network" all the patient monitors, oxygen saturation probes and whatnot into the central nurses station. Never seen one of those machines disconnect or go out of sync.

[@davidsummers6700]

Used to be the only way to sync my Palm Pilot Vx which came out in 1999. It had 8MB of storage on it, and I definitely remember trying to load a 4MB file onto it via the serial cable and it taking quite a long time to transfer.

[@devilcookie9924]

You can't imagine how many serial ports are using for hospitality industry like hotels. Almost hotels (even new built ones ) are still using DB-9 and DB-25 for their PMS systems.

[@dualCalibur]

I had to find a serial cable today at work for someone. It was for connecting to an irrigation system. Also those corporations still use fax machines and dedicated phone lines for them. Sucks to maintain.

[@sandyleask92]

I work as an engineer in the Marine Electronics sector. Serial Ports are heavily used on ships from old to new builds to carry NMEA data. This NMEA data could be GPS, AIS, Radar, Sonar etc to allow equipment talk and work reliably. Which is essential. You dont want your Autopilot to loose its heading from a Gyrocompass and cause the ship to turn hard over for example. It is cost effective to use as data rates are usually between 4800-38400 baud and don't need a wide bus to saturate. NMEA 2000 or Canbus is becoming more common but cost is still high compaired to serial. Can does Reduce the cables to just one main bus at the cost of reliability. Serial you have a backbone with multiple buffers incase one fails. You should have redundancies in place always. When working on new builds. You can be running km s of expensive can cable. When instead you could run cheap 2pair 24AWG as serial data, usually it's more attractive when you are already spending a few million on a new ship.

[@smileychess]

When I was a kid in the 90s, my dad drilled a hole in the wall between my bedroom and his office. We ran a serial cable through it so that we could play Command & Conquer (dos edition) together. Also Age of Empires. Good times.

[@startiger2]

I play around with radio systems as a hobby. MANY radio systems use serial to program and control their transceivers. It's only in that last few years that radio manufacturers started adding USB or Ethernet connections. I use serial enough that I put a PCI-e serial expansion card in my Win 10 desktop computer and I have a USB to serial adapter that I keep with my Win 11 laptop.

[@MK-of7qw]

RS-232 is amazing. Useful in all kinds of weird industrial equipment.

[@lucase6407]

Serial ports are also often used for ham radio. The biggest reason why is that com ports support the RTS and DTS pin protocol which allows physically shorting two pins, which is used to trigger the PTT (push to talk) on the radio, as if you were pressing the button on the side of the mic!

[@saltyroe3179]

In the old slow days, parallel ports transmitted a whole byte at a time. As speeds increased the differnce in arrival times of the bits became a problem. The solution was a standard for serial at much higher speed. This became possible as UART prices fell and performance lept ahead.

[@JBF-GST-Tanda]

Theatrical lighting fixtures are mostly controlled via DMX512, a variant of RS-485 serial protocol.

[@carltonhealy9457]

The Wellsite Information Transfer Specification (WITS) for communicating what a drilling rig is doing to third party contractors on a wellsite (i.e. oil and gas wells, geothermal wells) almost always works over RS-232. Ironically usually via a USB to RS-232 converter on the contractor's end. It's just sending ASCII characters on the order of a couple dozen every couple of seconds. Sometimes this is done via TCP/IP but this is somewhat rare unless you're somewhere like an offshore rig or in the Eastern Hemisphere. There is a newer standard called WITSML involving a web server that hosts much of the data and everyone getting the data in an XML format but this still hasn't caught on everywhere and is subtly different in it's use case.

[@jtsiomb]

Serial ports are absolutely essential for debugging operating system kernels, low level bare metal code, and embedded firmware. It's so simple to operate that an operating system can start spewing debug messages and accepting debugger input with a serial port from the very early bootup code. It can be very easily used with a handful of assembly instructions, even from inside an interrupt handler. You just can't replace that with a complicated USB driver stack. It's simply not fit for that use.

[@General_Li_Shin]

It's still in use today with low cost microcontrollers in small low cost devices

[@joeyd199]

Many pieces of laboratory equipment that aren't bandwidth- or speed-sensitive still use RS-232 ports. The computers in the lab I worked in during grad school all had PCIe add-in boards that included 2 or 3 RS-232 ports so we could log data. Software like LabView includes the necessary routines to communicate over RS-232 and write functional software. Worked just fine, and those machines will outlive us.

[@user-xs3dj6xy5p]

⬆️⬆️H.E.L.P.L.I.N.E.⬆️⬆️.................