Disappearing COM Ports
Legacy Removal and the Ease of Use Initiative

Owners of newer laptops have already discovered that many of the computers are being shipped without standard 9 pin RS-232 Serial Ports. This was not an oversight, but part of an overall strategy to simplify the operation and improve information throughput in and out of a PC.

The absence of the standard serial port on laptops will soon be evident on new desktop PCs. This will be gradually phased as part of a program called "Legacy Removal". Legacy Technology is a term that was given to long used technologies that are being used for the most part because that is the way it has always been, but newer platform technology exists that outperforms the older equipment. A Legacy feature is defined by the industry, as one for which there is a faster, superior, easier and/or less expensive alternative available.

Major PC manufacturers and industry heavy weights like Intel and Microsoft have gotten together since 1999 to create what they term the "Ease of Use Initiative", or the "Easy PC Initiative". It is an industry initiative to make PCs more Consumer friendly and remove what they see is stumbling blocks to an even more widespread use of Personal Computers.

The Initiative sets out to identify these stumbling blocks and what it is about PCs that create frustration for first time users in particular as well as long time users of PCs. The effort is geared around changing these stumbling blocks into building blocks for a new generation of PCs. Some of these building blocks have been identified as, "Instantly Available/ON NOW PC Technology", "Small Form Factor", "Universal Serial Bus (USB)", "Legacy Removal", and "Slotless Design Technologies". The coming generations of PC technology will be developed around the "Four S's" of Design: Speed, Security, Simplicity and Style.

The Legacy Bottleneck

The elements of Speed and Simplicity are what bump the new design philosophy up against the "Legacy Technology" of the Standard RS-232 Serial Port. The effort of "Legacy Removal" has placed the Serial Port on a dead end track with standard PC development. The ease of external Plug-and-Play, as well as the data speeds needed for digital imaging, video conferencing, and other digital audio and video interfacing, has pushed the use of USB as the standard interconnect technology.

The existing PCs have separate external ports for the connection of a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, as well as ports for other peripheral devices. To connect each device, you must first locate the appropriate port for that particular device. With the implementation of an array of USB ports that automatically recognize the device that is connected, any port can be used for any device. The goal is to simplify connectivity and reduce the "Out of Box" time. This is to eliminate the intimidating idea of having to decipher a spaghetti full of wires before a PC can be unpacked and up and running.

A "Legacy Removal Roadmap" has been established at the Intel Developers Forum in 1999 for the phasing out of "Legacy Technologies" in PCs. The first to go in this timeline was the ISA slot, used for adding special function cards to the available PC slots. Intel's Legacy Removal Roadmap calls for the gradual phase out of other technologies. On the list for removal are the following: Gameport/MIDI, PS2, Serial, Parallel, IDE, Floppy, VGA, and eventually all user-accessible slots.

USB & Firewire Connectivity

The concept among developers is that there are a sufficient number of manufacturers making cross over technologies such as USB and PCMCIA to serial devices to provide for the continued use of existing serial technology devices. Like USB, Firewire or 1394 is a high-speed serial bus connection designed to interconnect PCs with Consumer Electronics. The targets are the high-bandwidth devices such as camcorders, digital videodisk players, and other high-speed peer-to-peer applications. Newer technologies that provide more reliable and less expensive alternatives will gradually lead to the elimination of the older technologies. As the communication speeds of peripheral devices increase, the use of USB or Firewire as the preferred interface will increase.

Conclusion

Devices with standard DB9 RS-232 connections will gradually diminish, to be replaced with higher speed connections. This will reduce the need to include them on standard PC designs.

Referenced from Intel's Easy PC Initiative