Serial over Ethernet?
This article is going to go into the world of old-school and obscure. That was before we had the internet. Before we even had such a thing as an RJ-45 jack to network with. There were only two cost-effective ways of transferring data from one device to another during the ’80s and most of the ’90s. Parallel and Serial transfers. This allowed computers to make a very primitive ‘network’ of sorts by pairing multiple serial connectors together to effectively talk to a program such as a BBS (Bulletin Board System).
With the introduction of USB, the need for these types of adapters is greatly reduced over the years. The requirement of a serial port still arises from time to time whenever you are doing with older CNC Machinery, Thermal Printers, Solar power monitoring stations, Industrial PLCs, and most importantly to us hooking up to old machines like Commodores and Amigas to do file transfers. Maybe you want to hook your high-speed network up to a 56k modem so you can re-live the days of dial-up?
It seems a little masochistic to us but some people dig the whole “Nostalgia” theme. There you go! In this day and age where you can convert anything to anything, there surely must be an effective means of virtualization serial over Ethernet right?
Let’s find out!
