For the youngsters among us who had the luxury of growing up in the wonderful age of the USB port, here is a little trip down the narrow, winding road of the “RS232 Standard”. Back in the early days of computing most printers, terminals, modems and such were connected via RS232 serial ports. Now these connections were a far cry from “Plug-N-Play” (it was actually more like “Plug-N-Pray”), and getting them to work was often an exercise in mind-numbing trial and error which resulted more often than not in a powerful fit of frustration.
First of all, the RS232 “Standard” was anything but. RS232 was an 8 bit protocol, and some pieces of equipment were designed to use all 8 bits for data with no consideration of “parity” while others used 7 data bits with one parity bit. Oh, and the parity could be either even or odd, adding yet another variable into the almost unsolvable riddle which was coaxing two serial devices to “speak” to one another.
Even worse, some peripherals were designed to be DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) while others were DCE (Data Communications Equipment), each of which used an RS232 cable that was wired differently from the other. Some devices had a male RS232 connector while others used a female. And as if all of that wasn’t confusing enough, some used 25 pin connectors while others used connectors with 9 pins. Of course most computer users were bald back then (yes, even the women), and it’s easy to understand why. They simply had no hair left on their heads after they got through yanking it all out in frustration every time they needed to hook up a new piece of hardware!
Some peripherals came with a pretty decent pin diagram for the connectors and cables as well as a set of instructions for getting the thing going, but not all of them. And if you lost “the book”, you were on your own should you ever need to hook the device up to something else.
Contrast all of that nonsense with the ease and simplicity of connecting a USB device and you can see that today’s generation of computer geeks has it rather easy. Sometimes I’ll sit and wax nostalgic about the good ole days of computing, then memories of wresting with an RS232 serial device will pop into my head. Talk about ruining a thoroughly enjoyable reminiscence!
That is the kind of port our credit card machine has….enough said.