In 1962, a group of brilliant engineers have postulated the RS232 serial communications protocol, and until 1998 everybody worked with this communications channel very well. It was present on all PCs, until recently. Today, if you will check the newest models of computers on sale, you are going to discover more than half of the tower/desktop PCs do not have the serial RS232 connector (DB 9), and for certain no laptops have it. This is due to a group of only seven companies: they have figured out they can easily milk more money from users and developers, if they force the implementation of a