ANSWER: The most obvious difference is size. The parallel port on the back of your computer is a 25-pin port, while the serial port has room for nine pins. But the real difference is in the way they ...

Getting data to a storage medium requires transmission. Parallel transmission has historically been the preferred way to write data to disk. But at current speeds, serial transmission can be faster ...

So I'm trying to detect through Visual Basic 6.0 when a voltage change occurs on one of the pins of the serial/parallel port. The whole thing is pretty simple; no data transfer/handshaking/etc needs ...

The back of your PC is a rich source of connectivity. Ports and connectors exist for just about any device you can find, though some may be more obscure than others. In today’s USB-centric PC, it’s ...

Early microcomputers typically consisted of a half dozen (or more) circuit boards--plugged into a backplane--that implemented the central processor unit (CPU), memory, disk controllers and ...

While the average computer user likely hasn’t given much thought to the lowly serial port in decades, the same can’t be said for the hardware hacker. Cheap serial-to-USB adapters are invaluable for ...

In the March/April 2001 issue of Embedded Linux Journal (``All about Linux-friendly Single-Board Computers''), I traced the history of the embedded single-board computer (SBC) market from the early ...

Anyone know? I wanted to get something semi-rugged for a friends CNC setup, or at least something that's easy to get a skin for the keyboard. Thinkpad stuff is usually easier to find. I suppose a ...

A growing number of extremely small, yet highly integrated, single board computers (SBCs) make it increasingly easy to embed Linux in a wide range of applications, from handheld devices to embedded ...

This week, I will discuss advanced features of the BIOS. These include proper configuration of built-in peripherals, as well as power-management issues to consider. Let's dig in. This section of the ...