Serial Communication
Nowadays, servers are often located in data centers, where they can be remotely accessed by both end-users and system administrators. The servers themselves are usually supplied “headless,” which means that instead of having a graphics console (and associated keyboard), they are configured with a dumb terminal that connects via the serial port.
A modem may also be connected to provide access to the machine in the event of a network failure. Again, this will probably be via a serial port.
Although we'll only look at terminals and modems here, serial connectivity is used to control many other types of devices, including printers and digital cameras. The devices we'll describe use the RS-232 specification (officially known as ...
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