Welcome to the wonderful world of serial data communications. This is a part of a series of articles that will cover many aspects of serial data communications. I am going to try and start from the beginning and follow a layered approach to working with serial data and by the time we are through we should be able to transfer just about any sort of data that you would care to send over wires between computers. Possibly even without wires (wireless data communication).

There are so many aspects about this subject that sometimes it is a very hard nut to crack. I'm going to dive down and try to start with the basics and introducing the RS-232 serial data communications standard.