Things Every Hacker Once Knew
A lot of hardware still uses serial, and not just industrial stuff. Everything from sewing machines to remote controlled cameras.<p>If you work on embedded devices you will still encounter serial/RS-232 all the time. Often through USB-to-serial chips, which only adds to the challenge because they are mostly unreliable crap. Then there are about 30 parameters to configure on a TTY. About half do absolutely nothing, a quarter completely breaks the signal giving you silence or line noise, the final quarter only subtly breaks the signal, occasionally corrupting your data.<p>Still, there is nothing like injecting a bootloader directly to RAM over JTAG, running that to get serial and upload a better bootloader, writing it to flash and finally getting ethernet and TCP/IP up.