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COM port (DE-9 connector). COM (communication port) [1] [2] is the original, yet still common, name of the serial port interface on PC-compatible computers. It can refer not only to physical ports, but also to emulated ports, such as ports created by Bluetooth or USB adapters.
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS , OS/2 , and Windows .
Having serial port support as provided by BNU and other similar drivers allowed the communications software programmers to spend more time on the actual applications instead of the depths and details of how to talk to the serial ports and the modems connected to them. Sending communications data across a modem link was a lot more involved than ...
Most serial communications designs send the data bits within each byte least significant bit first. Also possible, but rarely used, is most significant bit first; this was used, for example, by the IBM 2741 printing terminal. The order of bits is not usually configurable within the serial port interface but is defined by the host system.
A software-based virtual serial port presents one or more virtual serial port identifiers on a PC which other applications can see and interact with as if they were real hardware ports, but the data sent and received to these virtual devices is handled by software that manipulates the transmitted and received data to grant greater functionality.
Frequent use of a serial port is for a direct computer-to-computer connection. This requires an adapter called a null modem, which isn't actually a modem in the traditional sense, but rather a connector plug that simply crosses the complementary pins on two serial ports so the two sides can communicate. A null modem typically connects the DTR ...
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Later personal computers (and other devices) started to make use of the standard so that they could connect to existing equipment. For many years, an RS-232-compatible port was a standard feature for serial communications, such as modem connections, on many computers (with the computer acting as the DTE). It remained in widespread use into the ...