Alan B Pearce wrote:
>
> I understood it would work way up into 3 digit port numbers. IIRC the 
> maximum number of COM ports is 256!
>
>  
>
>   
On NT (XP, w2K, Vista, Win7 are really NT) since  1993,  you have com 1 
to com 255

Visual basic's mscomm.dll  only allows  up  to 16 ports as it was 
written for "should have been strangled at birth" Windows 95. AFAIK you 
can edit a location in  the dll to have 255 ports.

Bluetooth and 3G Modems use a lot of serial ports.
I also have virtual serial over TCP/IP and local virtual serial ports to 
interconnect applications.

Linux has a different scheme. \dev\ttyNN and variants with different 
device name for USB
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