by Rich Washburn
I used to eat cereal like a mission. Middle school mornings, trying to beat my brother to the last bowl before the bus came. We’d burn through a box of Corn Pops or Frosted Flakes every two days between us. So on the final morning, I had a system. No bowl. No dishes. No ceremony. I’d peel the plastic liner up from the cardboard box, cuff it outward like a sleeve, pour the milk right into the bag, and go full trench-style breakfast—standing in the kitchen with a plastic spoon, eating cold cereal straight out of its original container like a raccoon in a RadioShack. Then I’d walk to the bus stop with the box in my hand, crunching away as suburban life yawned awake around me. Back then, that was cereal. But the other kind—serial—was something else entirely. Serial wasn’t crunchy or sweet. It wasn’t even user-friendly. Serial was ritual. And for those of us who were there, it was sacred. RS-232. COM ports. 9-pin. 25-pin. Null modems. Handshakes. Parity bits. DIP switches. DTE vs. DCE. Plug it in wrong and you didn’t just break your connection—you might blow out your controller board, or stab your hand on a bent pin that felt engineered to draw blood. Serial was the first language machines taught me. And it never spoke first. You talked to it through silence. You guessed. You configured. You flipped switches. You rebooted. You tried again. If you were lucky, you heard a chirp. If not? Black screen. Blinking cursor. Time to check IRQ conflicts and sacrifice a goat to COM2. Fast forward to now and you’ve got USB. Universal Serial Bus. Slick. Self-aware. Soft edges. Just plug it in and wait. Unless it’s USB-A. Then you enter the USB Superposition Paradox—where your first attempt to plug it in is always wrong, your second attempt is also somehow wrong, and then—only on the third flip, after cursing your ancestry—it fits. But at least USB doesn’t injure you. Old-school serial ports? Those were hardware hazing rituals. You had to earn that port. But here’s the twist—the real serial wasn’t even about mice or modems. That was just the surface. The real sorcery was happening beneath it all. The real sorcery... was UART. UART: Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter. Never heard of it? You’ve definitely used it. If it has a plug, a battery, a power supply—or it booted into your life and did what it was told—there’s a good chance a UART made it happen. UART is the silent protocol behind your TV, your router, your game console, your car’s dashboard, your smart fridge, your toothbrush, your thermostat. It’s how devices talk to each other before they know who they are. It's the first whisper in the boot cycle. And for those of us who like to... tinker? UART is the cheat code. The back door. The ritual dagger you use to carve your way into someone else’s finished product and make it your own. You want to jailbreak a smart speaker? Root a TV? Extract firmware from a device that refuses to be open? You’re not going in through the front door. You’re going to find the debug pads on the motherboard. Might not even be labeled. Just copper pads in the shadows, forgotten by the manual. You’ll solder to those. You’ll connect through TTL. You’ll fire up Minicom or PuTTY, start talking at 115200 baud, and hope it speaks back. And if it does? That’s not just access. That’s possession. You’ve reached into the belly of that machine, grabbed its soul through UART, yanked out its bootloader, its firmware, its memory map. You’ve become the phantom inside the shell. And then, with a few keystrokes, you write your own firmware. Your own rules. Your own identity. You exorcise the original intent of the machine and replace it with your own. The machine reboots. Not as what it was. But as what you made it. This is alchemy. This is defiance. This is art. And UART is the channel for it all. People these days don’t see it. Everything’s plug-and-play. Seamless. Clean. They don’t know what it was to wrestle with COM ports and serial consoles and pray that the cable you just built wasn't wired backward. But we do. We remember serial. We remember what it was to talk to the machine like it had a soul, because back then, it did. We remember when communication wasn’t free—it was earned. We remember UART not as an acronym, but as a lifeline. A bloodline. A portal into everything we weren’t supposed to touch... and touched anyway. So yeah. I remember cereal. And I definitely remember serial. And somewhere, in between those two boxes—one with sugar, one with pins— I learned everything I ever needed to know. _ C:\RETRO\RW> RUN /REMEMBER_SERIAL.EXE Connected. Root access granted.