Thanks to a special integrated circuit from FTDI Chip, computer peripherals with an RS232 interface are easily connected to a USB port. This simple solution is ideal if a peripheral does not have a USB port, your notebook PC has no free RS232 port available, or none at all!After a slow and faltering start, the USB port has become commonplace on PCs, to the extent that the latest GHz machines have just one RS232 port left, or none at all. The compact USB-RS232 interface described in this article allows your good old RS232 peripherals (printer, programmer system, etc.) to be hooked up to a USB port. The free driver programs for Win98/ME/2000/XP, Linux and Apple Macintosh make the interface virtually transparent, enabling the USB port to behave like a regular COM interface.