The Squeal of Data

(Seth Morabito/Flickr) The teletype directly influenced early computer connectivity and an iconic operating system When people were plugging modems into their computers for the first time, they were generally doing so through an RS-232 serial port, a port that was effectively a bridge between the past and what was then the present. First introduced in 1960 by the now-defunct Electronic Industries Association, was first released into the wild, the RS-232 standard is fundamental to the growth of the modem, as it set out a standardized way for a data terminal to communicate with a communications device. Before the first serial port, the interface style generally used with teletypes was something called a current loop interface, which relied on current to push data through wires, rather than voltage, which tends to be the way data is distributed through wires in the modern day.

Source: tedium.co