Serial Witchcraft: From Bits to Gigabits

When I was a kid, technology was a very different beast from what we have today. I remember my early adventures with computers involving serial ports - those humble connectors that offered a mere fraction of the speed and utility we take for granted today. If you had a computer in the 90s, you might recall those bulky, often 9- or 25-pin connectors, designed to transmit data so slowly you could practically count the bits as they streamed through.

Serial communication wasn’t just about data cables; it also powered the internet experience back then. I remember using dial-up modems with speeds of 14.4 kbps, then upgrading to the blazingly fast 33.3 kbps, and finally hitting the jackpot with a 56k modem. Even at those higher speeds, downloading a single megabyte of data could take upwards of 3 minutes. So, whether you were using a serial port to connect peripherals or a modem to connect to the web, speed was not something you expected to have on your side.

To give you some context, a serial port’s top baud rate of 115,200 bps translates to a data transfer rate of around 14.4 kilobytes per second. Transferring a 1MB file over that connection would take nearly 70 seconds—and that was with optimal conditions!

LAN Parties and Doom: The Glory Days of IPX Networks

Before the high-speed wonders of Ethernet or Wi-Fi, setting up a local network required a bit more elbow grease. IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange) was the protocol of choice back then, and we relied on coax cables to daisy-chain computers together. A LAN party wasn’t just about gaming, it was about bringing your entire desktop setup - massive CRT monitor and all - to a friend’s house.

I became popular amongst my friends not because of my social skills, but because I knew how to make coax cables and set up an IPX network so we could play Doom or Command & Conquer. If the network actually worked, it felt like a minor miracle, not that back then I really understood the details, learning through trial and error where to put terminators to make everything work.

IPX networks, typically operating over 10Base2 coaxial cable, could handle speeds of 10 Mbps or (1.25 megabytes per second).

But the real-world speeds were often much lower due to the network overhead. Still, compared to serial ports, this felt like rocket fuel for multiplayer gaming. You could finally frag your friends without watching the game lag and freeze every few seconds.

Jump to Today: USB-C is Witchcraft?

So here we are in 2024, and I find myself marvelling at what I can do with a single USB-C cable. Take my home setup, for example: down one small, reversible cable, I have 4x DisplayPort streams at 60Hz in 4K, Audio, a 1 Gbps network connection, and enough bandwidth left over to run a USB hub that powers my stream deck and 4K webcam. All that, plus it delivers 100 watts of power to charge my laptop. And this isn't even the limit of what it can do. How is this even possible? And thanks to an EU mandate I can even use it to charge my phone or headphones.

To most people USB-C is just a charger cable but take a moment to consider how insane the small connector is. With data speeds up to 40 Gbps (via Thunderbolt 4), USB-C can handle everything from external GPUs to multiple 4K displays and high-fidelity audio, all while supplying 100 watts of power to charge your laptop. It can even be plugged in either way up.

In terms of raw numbers, that’s a difference of over 34,000,000% compared to the 115,200 bps of the old serial port. To visualize that: a USB-C cable today can transfer more data in one second than a serial port from the 90s could transfer in an entire day.