I am confused about the these 3 concepts. My understanding is, Serial Port usually means RS-232 compatible port (RS = Recommended Standard). USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. So its name contains serial port, does it support RS-232? What does the Universal mean? And what does COM port mean?

The PL2303 USB to UART Bridge Virtual COM Port (VCP) drivers are required for device operation as a Virtual COM Port to facilitate host communication with PL2303 products. PL2303 USB to UART Bridge Drivers (Windows). Prolific Full-Speed USB to Serial bridge controller PL-2303HX(Chip Rev A) and PL-2303X (Chip Rev A) will be phased out. Home » Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port (COM3) Use the links on this page to download the latest version of Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port (COM3) drivers. All drivers available for download have been scanned by antivirus program.

ADD 1 Some understanding from Hans' answer: To reduce effort, device manufacturers usually make their device can behave like a serial port device as well. Iron man 1 pc game crack download. This relies on the the fact that many OS and language libraries have already included serial port communication support. Though such support is no comparable to a real matching device driver.

ADD 2 A good reference doc about. And btw, is really useful. Serial port is a type of device that uses an UART chip, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. One of the two basic ways to interface a computer in the olden days, parallel ports were the other way. Serial is simple to hook up, it doesn't need a lot of wires. Parallel was useful if you wanted to go fast, typ 8 times faster than serial, but cables and connectors were expensive.

Parallel I/O has completely disappeared from computer designs, caught up by tremendous advances in bus transceivers, the kind of chip that can transmit an electrical signal down a wire. COM comes from MS-Dos, it is a device name. Short for 'COMmunication port'.

Computers in the 1980's usually had two serial ports, labeled COM1 and COM2 on the back of the machine. This name was carried forward into Windows, most any driver that simulates a serial port will create a device with 'COM' in its name.

LPT was the device name for parallel ports, short for 'Line PrinTer'. RS-232 was an electrical signaling standard for serial ports. It is the simplest one with very low demands on the device, supporting just a point-to-point connection. RS-422 and RS-485 were not uncommon, using a twisted pair for each signal, providing much higher noise immunity and allowing multiple devices connected to each other.

USB means Universal Serial Bus. Empowered by the ability to integrate a micro-processor into devices that's a few millimeters in size and costs a few dimes. It replaced legacy devices in the latter 1990s. F1 challenge 99-02 mod 2011. It is Universal because it can support many different kinds of devices, from coffee-pot warmers to disk drives to wifi adapters to audio playback.

It is Serial, it only requires 4 wires. And it is a Bus, you can plug a USB device into an arbitrary port. It competed with FireWire, a very similar approach and championed by Apple, but won by a land-slide.

The only reason that serial ports are still relevant in on Windows these days is because a USB device requires a custom device driver. Device manufacturers do not like writing and supporting drivers, they often take a shortcut in their driver that makes it emulate a legacy serial port device. So programmers can use the legacy support for serial ports built into the operating system and about any language runtime library. Rather imperfect support btw, these emulators never support plug-and-play well. Discovering the specific serial port to open is very difficult. And these drivers often misbehave in impossible to diagnose ways when you jerk a USB device while your program is using it.

'The only reason that serial ports are still relevant in computing these days.' -- That sounds like a PC-centric perspective, not an accurate computer industry-wide viewpoint. SoCs almost always have at least one UART for a serial console, since a UART is easy in both the HW and SW sense to use for an interface. 'a USB device requires a device driver.' -- All devices (regardless of the bus) require a driver. Whether you have to install it or if it's already in the OS is another issue. USB requires a protocol stack (because it's a multi-device bus).

– Jan 14 '15 at 18:26 •. USB stand for Universal Serial Bus not Port. The term 'serial port' simply means that the data is transferred one bit at a time over a single signal path - in that sense even Ethernet is serial in nature.