[WalterBright]

In the olden days, I'd drive my Fred Flintstone car to work. Serial I/O was done by wire-wrapping a UART chip on the board, which handled all the dirty details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8250_UART

Though the UART chip I used was years earlier than that. Perhaps the Wikipedia article is wrong on that point.

[analog31]

On my first PC, the serial port was an add-on board, and I wire-wrapped one to save a few bucks. My hands were trembling as I powered it up. I don't remember the chip either. Next time I "wired" a UART, it was built into a microcontroller. I also bit-banged one for the PIC16C84 MCU.

But asynchronous serial isn't completely obsolete yet. It just has more protocol layers on top of the physical layers.

[WalterBright]

I had a design notebook for the project, which included all the datasheets for the various chips. Dammed if I know what happened to it.