Serial Ports Are STILL Around!

we're all used to usb as a super versatile connector we can use to connect most things but did you know it only started gaining popularity in the late 1990s how the heck did we hook up anything before that tape and string turns out the answer's no printers used these big chunky parallel ports monitors used the d-sub vga port while the ps2 connector was common for keyboards and mice but if you needed to hook up some other type of gadget there was a good chance you were using this guy simply called a serial port don't worry he's harmless and yes the s in usb also stands for serial but when we say serial port in computer land we're typically talking about the old-school 9-pin connector that people also called a com port or an rs-232 port it had little screws that threaded into the pc itself to hold it in place as well as to prevent the connector from bending too much especially since it had a bunch of pins sticking out but old serial ports weren't just different from usb and how they looked they were a lot slower some devices could only transfer data at 75 bits per second while faster devices could get up to around 115 kilobits per second for reference the average home internet speed in the us today is over 400 times faster they didn't even have tick tock back then but the slow speeds didn't always matter very much when you consider what serial ports were typically used for they were very popular for connecting early dial-up modems back in the day if your pc didn't have one built in that is which could only hit groovy speeds of 56 kilobits per second you also found them on old-school personal assistants like the palm pilot as a way to sync data between the device and a pc as well as on uninterruptible power supplies as the serial port provided a data connection so you could keep tabs on the battery charge level there was even early smart home equipment that used a serial port to communicate with a base station that could then send signals to smart plugs to turn lights on and off serial ports also had uses beyond home pcs they've actually been around since the 1960s and back then they were used for teletypes which were popular for long distance communication before all the cool kids and corpo fat cats started using fax machines to send each other important memos and hot recipes even though serial ports are very slow it just didn't matter much back when screens could only display a few lines of text at a time and while teletypes are obviously obsolete now serial ports are actually still around we'll tell you why right after we thank freshbooks for sponsoring this video freshbooks is the invoicing and accounting solution that's built for owners and their clients freshbooks users save a ton of time and money we're talking 11 hours a week that they used to spend sorting through invoices and keeping track of financials plus 94 of freshbooks users say it's super easy to get up and running and with award winning support you're never alone switch to freshbooks today and join over 24 million people who have used it and loved it try freshbooks free for 30 days no credit card required go to freshbooks.comtechquickie to get started today even though you won't find a serial port on a modern pc they still have an appeal because well they just work attached devices usually don't need complicated and sometimes temperamental drivers to function which is important for certain kinds of work equipment cash registers medical devices and industrial machinery still are commonly equipped with serial ports because they're so reliable and they look cool it's like 80s punk and when you think about it the slow speeds really don't matter that much sending a product id scanned in from a barcode a record of how much money a stick of gum cost the temperature of a critical piece of equipment or even the sound of someone's voice over a satellite phone just doesn't use very much data so even though the serial port is a dinosaur by modern standards the reliability it offers still makes it an attractive choice and we'd be remiss if we didn't also mention cost not only are serial ports cheap to implement but if you have millions of dollars of older equipment using them you wouldn't want to replace it until you absolutely had to and i think most businesses would rather spend that money on something like employee beanbag chairs i miss them thanks for sitting on your bean bag in whatever form it takes and watching this whole video hey like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other videos and comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow techwiki the youtube channel about technology done quick

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 512,492

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Id: kvNm7nmEUFo

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022