The serial problem for Desktops and laptops really isn't that much of a problem, if you are willing to say "goodbye" to the high street shops and spend a little cash.
Reading your aticle reminds me what my father has in his desktop. My fathers requirement was 2 serial ports and a parallel port at the time he upgraded both computers
(mine and his
) to P4 2.4ghz computers, ironically, obsolete now. Fate turns out that he A
) got the wrong motherboard and B
) when he got the right motherboard, he had only 1 serial port anyway!
Whereas yours truely had a P4 motherboard with 2 serial ports. Even now, I was lucky to have a Centrino laptop with one serial port
(The parallel port I really don't need to use that often, only on occasions when I had a Cannon BubbleJet BJC-70
).
So the solution is that my father got a PCI card, known as "Brain Box". It adds a parallel port and 2 serial ports to your computer. It only takes up 1 PCI slot and I think Windows fully supports it. I'll have to ask my father
(Known as Dodgey Rogdey to his Plessy coleuges during the 80's - before they went bust!
)
The other solution which I almost forgot about, was a PCMCIA card. These tend to come in many flavours, by that, there is 1 port, 2 port or I am lead to believe, more ports. The good news is that some also work with any CE2 or above
(IIRC - I know I saw one in RS that supports CE3
) devices. So it'll be quite cool to use one of these cards and hook on a mouse, another PDA, a printer/plotter
(Hmmm, a HP7475A anyone? its sitting under my bed!
) and what else you can think of. The downside is the expense.
Of course, we aren't the only ones in this situation. A lot of industrial users and retail users still use the serial port today, in Consumer cases
(where your users "joe blogs" resuide
), then sadly, they don't need it. USB has killed almost everything, it is sad to say. And for consumer PCs, there isn't a lot of serial options left.
From RS
(Available at
http://rswww.com/), for the PCI card, the stock number is 514-0995. As for the PCMCIA Card
(PCMCIA to avoid confusion
), the stock number is 365-5263
I hope these are some use