Serial port Yost standard combines DSR and DCD. Some serial ports on motherboards or add-in cards provide jumpers that select whether pin 1 of the DE-9 connector connects to DCD or a power supply voltage, and whether pin 9 of the DE-9 connector connects to RI or a power supply voltage. The power supply voltage can be +5V, +12V, +9V, or ground. (Selection varies by vendor.) The power is intended for use by point-of-sale equipment. Makers include Dell, HP, and others (This is not an official standard.) Operating systems usually create symbolic names for the serial ports of a computer, rather than
Serial port only through a pin header. Small-form-factor systems and laptops may omit RS-232 connector ports to conserve space, but the electronics are still there. RS-232 has been standard for so long that the circuits needed to control a serial port became very cheap and often exist on a single chip, sometimes also with circuitry for a parallel port. The individual signals on a serial port are unidirectional and when connecting two devices the outputs of one device must be connected to the inputs of the other. Devices are divided into two categories "data terminal equipment" (DTE) and "data circuit-terminating equipment" (DCE).