15 Facts About RS-232

In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard originally introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data.

The RS-232 standard had been commonly used in computer serial ports and is still widely used in industrial communication devices.

Serial port complying with the RS-232 standard was once a standard feature of many types of computers.

Thanks to their simplicity and past ubiquity RS-232 interfaces are still used—particularly in industrial machines, networking equipment, and scientific instruments where a short-range, point-to-point, low-speed wired data connection is fully adequate.

RS-232 was first introduced in 1960 by the Electronic Industries Association as a Recommended Standard.

Related searches

For many years, an RS-232-compatible port was a standard feature for serial communications, such as modem connections, on many computers.

RS-232 is still used to connect older designs of peripherals, industrial equipment, console ports, and special purpose equipment.

RS-232 is used beyond the original purpose of interconnecting a terminal with a modem, successor standards have been developed to address the limitations.

Today, RS-232 has mostly been replaced in personal computers by USB for local communications.

Advantages compared to RS-232 are that USB is faster, uses lower voltages, and has connectors that are simpler to connect and use.

Disadvantages of USB compared to RS-232 are that USB is far less immune to electromagnetic interference and that maximum cable length is much shorter.

RS-232 ports are commonly used to communicate to headless systems such as servers, where no monitor or keyboard is installed, during boot when operating system is not running yet and therefore no network connection is possible.

RS-232 standard defines the voltage levels that correspond to logical one and logical zero levels for the data transmission and the control signal lines.

The RS-232 device asserts RTS to tell the converter to take control of the RS-485 bus so that the converter, and thus the RS-232 device, can send data onto the bus.

Minimal "3-wire" RS-232 connection consisting only of transmit data, receive data, and ground, is commonly used when the full facilities of RS-232 are not required.