serial communication

TRX
May 6, 2015 at 3:26 PM

> digital natives

Maybe ten years ago I mentioned I still had a DOS VM with QModem, an RS-232 breakout box, and various serial adapters. The millennials laughed and laughed.

Not long after I got a call; a client knew somebody who knew somebody who'd heard about the guy who was willing to work on weird old computers; would I be willing to come out to their plant and have a go at wiring up an elderly CNC plasma cutter? I went out there, the controller ran one of the real-time DOS workalikes and it talked to the rest of the machinery over serial connections. And it even came with a booklet with pinouts and signal levels. Which might as well have been heiroglyphics to the factory tech who'd flown in to look at it; all he knew was the newer machines that ran Windows.

I had to go back home and get my soldering iron, but I had it up and running by lunchtime. And it made me a nice chunk of money.

Serial communication may be old-fashioned, but it's certainly not dead yet.