serial port

A socket on a computer used to connect a modem, data acquisition terminal or other serial device via a slow-speed serial interface. Earlier PCs used the serial port for the mouse, and earlier Macintoshes used the serial port to attach a printer. Although widely used in data acquisition, the serial port is a legacy interface on the PC, having been superseded by the USB bus.

DB (D-Sub) Connectors and COM Ports
If present, the serial port on the back of a PC is a male 9-pin connector (DE-9 D-sub connector). Earlier PCs may have had two 9-pin connectors or one 9-pin and one 25-pin (DB-25). On a PC, serial ports are called "COM ports," identified as COM1, COM2, etc. See COM1 and D-sub connectors.

Serial, Parallel and Game
In earlier PCs, one or two serial ports, one parallel port and one game port were included on the motherboard. On the first PCs, these ports were contained on a stand-alone expansion board plugged into the ISA bus. Contrast with parallel port. See serial interface and RS-232.

Faster, But Still Serial
The USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) interfaces were added to PCs in 1998, offering a quantum jump in transfer rate, plus the ability to daisy chain large numbers of devices on the same bus. Like the legacy serial port, USB and FireWire are also serial interfaces. See USB and FireWire.

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(hardware, communications)

serial port - (Or "com port") A connector on a computer to which you can attach a serial line connected to peripherals which communicate using a serial (bit-stream) protocol. The most common type of serial port is a 25-pin D-type connector carrying EIA-232 signals. Smaller connectors (e.g. 9-pin D-type) carrying a subset of EIA-232 are often used on personal computers. The serial port is usually connected to an integrated circuit called a UART which handles the conversion between serial and parallel data. In the days before bit-mapped displays, and today on multi-user systems, the serial port was used to connect one or more terminals (teletypewriters or VDUs), printers, modems and other serial peripherals. Two computers connected together via their serial ports, possibly via modems, can communicate using a protocol such as UUCP or CU or SLIP.