Carrying Serial Devices into the Future

In the lab, and on the test bench, digital data was carried by, first, RS-232 cables. RS-232, or Recommended Standard 232, was an EIA standard for asynchronous data communication that provided bidirectional communication between two devices. From the early 1970s, IEEE established a standard for multi-drop serial communication that was similar to RS-232, but would allow up to 15 devices to communicate with each other over the same cable. This is known as RS-485.