And if you were to go back a few more years into the past, you’d have found when you bought a mouse with a PS/2 connector fitted, it may well have come with an adapter for a 9-pin RS232 serial port.

Reminiscent of the serial terminal access controllers that were found in dumb terminal sites back in the day, it’s a box with eight DB-9 connectors for serial ports and a single RJ45 Ethernet port.

That's why laptops with a true RS232 serial port are at a premium for certain applications.<BR><BR>There are *some* USB-Serial bridges that are better than others.

Bring Back the RS-232 Serial Port. Jan. 24, 2012. I know, RS-232 is not gone completely but in most things it has disappeared. Recently I bought a new laptop to use in my ham shack.

I'm a bit out of my league on this one. I need to take realtime data from a serial source and display it in a "retail display" type of fashion. My PLC sends data out via RS232 (I also have RF485 ...

The need arose for a programmable control system that handles 8-bit data to have both RS-232 and RS-485 modes. ... P2 with lines Rx and Tx was connected to the PC's RS-232 serial port.