I've done quite a bit of work with serial ports on Windows, Linux and other unixes. I've also written a serial device driver.
Your comment is very confusing to me. The serial ports are abstracted to a file on Windows just like on unixes - the file is actually discussed in the above article: \COM1
Maybe you're talking about the old days where you would just outb 0x3f8? The modern interfaces are actually fairly similar.
Remember typing in entire programs from magazines and computer manuals and saving them to cassette tape or floppy disc? That was "the good ol' days" for sure… :)
There is also the persistent problem of USB serial adapters being assigned incremental numbers until they're in double digits that many tools don't let you select from their GUI. So you have to go in and manually purge those devices to get back to sane numbering.
Your comment is very confusing to me. The serial ports are abstracted to a file on Windows just like on unixes - the file is actually discussed in the above article: \COM1
Maybe you're talking about the old days where you would just outb 0x3f8? The modern interfaces are actually fairly similar.