Nowadays only full sized motherboards have a serial (RS232) port (and still not all of them). 99.9% of small motherboards and laptops do not have one. Why is that?
On the contrary, servers have plenty of serial ports. An Intel desktop server I saw recently (I think it was the SC5300) had one at the front and two at the rear panel, with brackets for adding even more if needed.
What serial devices are used on a server?
Uninterruptable power supplies typically communicate over serial ports.
Also servers are often called upon to communicate with legacy devices, such as point of sale or stocktaking hardware (although arguably some of this is just because they have a serial port).
Many server BIOSs can give you a console via a serial port. I installed Linux on an HP B1000 server with a wacky HVC video card I couldn’t use that way.
Another device sometimes attached to servers via the serial port would be an analogue modem; either so that the machine can dial out and poll data from remote sites (shops, monitoring stations etc) or to allow a remote user/administrator to dial in and access the network from a laptop etc.
These applications are becoming less common, but they’re still out there.
well, as I imagine you are aware of, almost all computers have serial ports-just not RS-232. USB and firewire are both serial interfaces. So serial ports didn’t go extinct-they evolved.
As was pointed out, servers have RS-232 ports so that they can talk to monitoring devices. Such devices were designed long ago, work, and there is no reason to convert their design to a newer serial interface that is much faster than they need.
Its for the same reason there’s no longer 8-track tape players in cars. They’ve been made obsolete. Legacy users can alway install them on an aftermarket basis but I’m glad I’m not paying for serial ports on my computers.
I didn’t get a single word out of that!
Well, the incremental cost need not be more than a few $ - probably a lot less thn the cost of that printer port that most laptops still include. In view of the many thousands of simple serial devices (GPS receivers, etc.) out there, I feel the decision to get rid of serial ports was a trifle hasty and widespread.
The solution, of course, is to buy one of those USB-to-RS232 adaptor cables. They are cheap, though not near as cheap as including the serial port would be. Sometimes they actually work.
jnglmassiv: If by obsolete you mean out of fashion, I suppose you might be right. But RS232 is a standard, mature technology that can be implemented pretty much anywhere for little cost and at high reliability. It isn’t controlled by Apple or Microsoft or any of their pet hardware makers, and there is a very wide body of software that can use it. It’s no more obsolete than the keyboard.
USB is cute, especially in that it mixes a power supply with the communications link, but it isn’t mature and it still suffers from poor implementations. And has anyone seen Firewire connections on a non-Mac, non-Sony PC? Didn’t think so. Neither of them can be considered serious replacements to RS232. Supplements maybe, but not replacements.
What’s wrong with USB? I’m so glad it replaced serial and PS/2. Now I can have dozens of devices, connect them in any order and not have to configure any of them. It’s not just “cute”. For many desktop users, it can (and already has) replaced the legacy ports.
From what I gather, a good bit of this is still made possible by blodging things a good bit on the software side. Serial has a definite minimum requirements sheet that everyone follows perfectly–simply because no one is going to go back and fix the serial software to work with your non-standard implementation. While as if some major player with a really cool device wants to do something funky with USB that wasn’t expected–he’ll just release it and it’s up to drivers and Microsoft to make it work correctly.
For instance, if you try a USB hardrive-stick thing on Linux vs. running it on Windows–it is flawless on Windows, showing it up within moments of plugging it in and disappearing just as quick when you yank it, and all of your files are perfectly accessible. But then on Linux, you’ll get times when it does connect, others where it doesn’t, the OS might find it but it looks like an unformatted disk, etc. Simply so many people cheat the standard that someone trying to implement the software to handle it without any device-specific documentation outside the standard, and you’ll get wonkiness.
So nothing magical about serial, just simply that it’s one thing that–if you see a serial port on a device, you know exactly what you’re going to get and it will be flawless every time (…well something like that 
)
Sure, you’ll need drivers for many USB devices, but that’s expected. All but the most basic serial devices (like simple mice) need to be configured or operated via special drivers, too. If you’re a computer dude, you might be able to do something with the flawless standard signals that come over your serial port, but the average user will still need pre-written software. The USB devices that need drivers usually come with them, so from the user’s perspective, that’s not even a problem.
As for the USB drives… that’s really more of a problem with Linux, then, isn’t it? Besides, USB Mass Storage (and maybe its Firewire equivalent) is what made those drives so popular to begin with. They wouldn’t be practical over serial.
This is the motherboard that I have. 4 - USB 2.0 and 2 - Firewire slots. Thats it. Nothing Else. I now need a new printer 
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Why are the ports going by the wayside? When you can move data at high speeds over the smaller cables of USB or FIrewire, why wouldn’t you? To be honest I am equally surprised that so many motherboards still support floppy drives.
I got a USB to Parallel adaptor around here somewhere, but no use for it now because I already got a new printer.
Well, I was speed posting from work. 
If you start up a PC, you get to control it via keyboard and monitor. Servers give more options - my old B1000 had a proprietary video output that would have required spending hundreds on a special video cable. Since I only wanted the thing for a server, video was redundant. With no OS though, the only way to install anything was to control the machine through the serial port, which HP had thoughfully provided support for.
USB is faster, but serial is much more flexible. With even a DOS floppy, I can send commands over a serial cable directly to my modem or any other device attached to the serial port. With USB it’s not possible to directly address individual hardware with generic software.
(This last paragraph makes me think about why - in a command-line/text based system, serial ports make complete sense, and USB requires mucking about to set up - in a graphical system (where everything is handled automagically), USB is easiest as it broadcasts IDs for instant driver use, whereas serial devices stay silent unless specifically configured by the user.)
In any case, plain serial isn’t going to disappear I don’t think - serial lines come free on almost all your standard PICs (programmable IC) which makes it the communication method of choice for smalltime-custom or homebrew hardware.
Info for those that don’t know (I was surprised to find it out, so I thought I would pass it along).
Serial communications is faster than parallel, and is not going away (I know, you are really referring to RS232).
That’s why USB is Universal Serial Bus. Trying to synchronize multiple transmission signals was slowing parallel down, they found they could get better throughput using higher speed serial connections.
Serial is not faster than parallel, RaftPeople.
It’s certainly true that a good implementation of a serial interface is better than a poor implementation of a parallel one, but within any given technology a parallel interface will always beat a serial one as far as speed is concerned. In its simplest form, if you have a serial channel A between two devices with a certain bandwidth, you can (almost always) add a second channel B to double the bandwidth (2-bit parallel).
What makes the Universal Serial Bus faster than the old Centronics parallel PC “printer” port is that smart silicon became a lot cheaper than dumb copper. USB requires a lot more intelligence at both ends of the bidirectional 2-wire differential signal interface (the other two wires being power and ground) than Centronics did with 8 data, 4 control, and 5 status lines plus various grounds. USB1.x provides about the same bandwidth as an ECP or EPP parallel “printer” port.
Because serial links have cost savings (IC pins, PCB real estate, connector, and cable) compared to parallel links, communications R&D focuses on serial links. Once the technology has been optimized for the highest performance over a single channel, however, bandwidth can be increased at will just by adding more of the same channels in parallel. (This does not necessarily imply that multiple channels may use the same clock, however).
A good example of this is Camera Link, which is what scientific imaging devices use when USB2 and Firewire are just not up to the task. The Camera Link specs define a 26-pin parallel cable and connector of which the highest-bandwidth part involves four parallel differential data pairs and a differential clock (i.e. that’s 10 of the 26 wires, the others being slower signals or ground connections). The current maximum data rate per channel is 560Mbits/second, so with the four data channels that’s 2.24Gbps total. For cameras that provide even higher data rates, multiple Camera Link connectors and cables may be needed. For instance, a camera using three Camera Link cables can provide 6.72Gbps of data to whatever is downstream that is capable of handling such a data torrent (and such setups are available commercially).
Why don’t such cameras simply use a single serial port? Because the current technology is not up to the task. At whatever point in the future such serial technology exists, the above camera will use the new serial link (Firewire6720?). Shortly thereafter, the next generation of data-generators (e.g. cameras) will undoubtedly arrive with a higher bandwidth requirement, and the new serial link will be parallelized. Sic semper communicantors.
And I’ve got a couple of those too, thanks to Logitech. Never really found a use for them, as I’ve never really need to go that way, though an adapter for the other way would have been useful once.
I guess it is the same reason RS232 won’t die. Floppy drives are damn useful for moving small files/running small programs and they can work from command line. Partition Magic and Norton Ghost are two programs that come to mind.
Also, a floppy is needed for loading RAID/SATA drivers during the installation of Windows XP