I used to have a very old pentium II laptop that I saved because it was my only computer that had a serial port that I could use to connect to my Cisco router via a console cable.
Well, a few months ago I got rid of my old laptop and now I only have my iMac which obviously has no serial port for my console cable.
I went out and bought an aluratek usb to serial adapter so that my blue console cable can plug into it. It came with a cd which I have since lost, but the driver is on their website and was a sinch to install.
Once you have installed the driver for your usb to serial adapter and you open up terminal and look at the devices under /dev you will now see tty.usbserial.
At first I thought that I would need some third party software in order to connect to my cisco router and I even downloaded a couple, but later realized that you can just use the ‘screen’ command inside of terminal to connect. Just type: screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600. That simple.