The serial port was one of the highly popular connections on the motherboard in the 80s and much of the 90s, all computers had at least one of them and it was where various external peripherals were connected. However, this port is no longer used today and has become a relic of the past. What is it that led to the demise of this port and what is its current replacement?
0 , which can be a computer with a peripheral, but where data is transmitted at the rate of 1 bit per pulse or clock cycle in one or both directions . So the advantage of these interfaces is that they are relatively simple and are often used for external peripherals such as keyboards, printers, mice, game controllers, scanners, and a long list of other devices.
Why did the serial port disappear?
To begin with, we have to clarify that it is totally false that they disappeared, they are still used today and they are the USB ports . What did disappear were the COM ports . Dropping that statement is like saying that we no longer have parallel ports to connect cards as the ISA port disappears and is replaced by PCI ports first and PCI Express later. That is, the appearance of a technology that does the same thing, but in a more efficient and accessible way.
The most popular COM port used for years was called RS-232 , which could transmit 19.2 Kbps , this means 0.0192 megs in one second. Today with a standard USB4 you have a bandwidth of 40 Gbps. The difference in speed is 2,083,333.33 times faster than the fastest serial port type back then. So we can certainly say without a doubt that this has evolved a lot from how it was on the first PCs.
Today and due to the fact that there are still systems with applications that make use of this type of port to communicate their data with the outside world. This is something that few people know, but originally the environments did not support multitasking, so information was transmitted from one computer to another through this port. Well, the famous clipboard with the cut, copy and paste functions emulate the operation at the software level of the COM or RS-232 serial port.
They are hidden all over your PC
Normally, we usually call port or slot to any interconnection to which we can connect a peripheral or an internal component, but the reality is that, for example, the connections for the fans use are a type of serial port whose information allows to regulate the speed at the that these work.
Another example is in your video connection, which is a mixed type connection. On the one hand, images and audio are transmitted in parallel, but things like the configuration for the synchronization between the screen and the video interface are done through a serial port included in the same connector.
So the answer is that they have not disappeared, they have simply either become faster or have been transformed by being integrated into other ports. What is normal and usual in the technological evolution to which we are accustomed.
