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Serial Port

The PC or the Computer in general consists of a processor, memory and the devices. The PC supports a wide variety of devices that include the video adapter and the keyboard.

The parallel and serial ports are also the general purpose interfaces that are incorporated into almost all computers. These ports enable you to attach standard peripherals, such as the printer or a mouse etc.

A serial port receives data from and transmits data to the computer one byte at a time but it receives data from and transmits data to external devices one bit at a time. But a parallel port receives and transmits the data one byte at a time.

A computer usually has two serial ports that are COM1 and the COM2. The parallel port is called as the LPT1. The serial ports are protruding from the back of the computer. They may be either the 9 pin ports or the other one are quite larger with 25 pins support. They can male or female ports.

The parallel and the USB are much faster than the serial ports but still the standard serial ports are always found in the computer systems. Even the latest in the data transmission technology that is the firewire is also much capable of data transfer.

This is the most standard and also the earliest form of ports. This was accomplished by utilizing the RS – 232 standard that actually connected by the simple cables.

In the Linux operating system, the serial port device is called as the /dev/ttyS* where * is a number that starts with a 0 and corresponds to the next drive. The method of labeling COM1 and COM2 is specific in the Ms Windows operating system.

There exist many settings for the serial port connection. The setting are usually done on the basis of the speed, parity and stop bits and many other conventional notations.

The parallel ports are also similar to the serial ports.

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