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 nine pin connector that people also called a COM port
or an RS232 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 TikTok 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. 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 beanbag
in whatever form it takes and watching this whole video.
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