None of the current Macintoshes have have serial ports, but there are adaptors that allow serial devices to be connected via the USB port found on the newer machines.

To the extent that they follow any standard, most instrument manufacturers will specify that the serial port is an ``RS-232'' connection. The serial connection is also relatively slow by modern standards, but that is not at all a problem for this application. Different connectors are used, and, even worse, different equipment manufacturers have different ideas about how the connector pins should be wired! Finding a cable with the right kind of connector at each end is no guarantee that it will work. The worst, probably, is the fact that it is one of the least standardized standards in the computer industry. The good thing about a serial connection is that it is relatively easy to write software to transmit data over it. It was originally designed to connect computers or terminals to modems, but it has also been used to connect computers to each other, to printers and to a variety of peripheral devices including scientific instruments. The serial connection is one of the oldest bits of computer technology that is still with us. This additional documentation is intended for those who might want to interface another instrument with a Macintosh or, for some other reason, would like to know more about this arcane subject. A Macintosh application written for this purpose, MacSpec II, is available at the Goldenberg Lab web page, and the documentation provided with the program includes instructions for making connections to the currently supported spectrophotometers. This document is the result of my own attempts to understand the intricacies of serial port connections, especially in the context of interfacing Macintosh computers with spectrophotometers. Note: This document is also available as a pdf file (Adobe Acrobat).Ģ From the Instrument side: The RS-232 standardĥ The Macintosh side: An RS-422 connectionĦ Connections to three spectrophotometers

Apple mac serial port terminal