gnupic: USB programmer and - serial ports.
Subject:
Re: USB programmer and - serial ports.
From:
"Mark J. Dulcey" ####@####.####
Date:
10 Jan 2005 03:41:18 +0000
Message-Id: <41E1F96C.8020402@buttery.org>
Paul B. Webster wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 17:36, Jerry Zdenek wrote:
>
>
>>Laptops are getting very hard to find with serial ports. Just looking at
>>Dell, only one model actually has a serial port on it. I'm just hoping
>>that when my current one breaks, I still will be able to buy a new
>>laptop with a serial port.
>
> Of course, the question is *why* would anyone, apart from a hardware
> developer in the rare instance, require a serial port?
Systems administrators also often need serial ports. There are many old
pieces of equipment still in use in data centers that are configurable
only by the serial port. Furthermore, they typically come with
proprietary DOS programs to set them up, and the DOS programs directly
manipulate the serial port, so USB-serial converters won't work.
Windows does physical port emulation for actual serial ports, so you can
usually run the old DOS programs in the DOS box of modern versions of
Windows. But it doesn't do port emulation for USB-based serial ports;
you can only get to the latter through BIOS routines (which Windows DOES
emulate) or Windows APIs.
