Where does the term "serialization" come from?

Question

I know what serialization is, but to me, this is one term that does not describe what it means.

Why do we call serialization serialization? What is it about converting objects to raw data (and inflating/deserializing, for that matter) lends itself towards anything that related to the term "serial"? Who coined this term and why?

Answer 1

It's probably from networking and communications, where it is necessary to convert data into a serial stream of ones and zeros.

Wikipedia says:

In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be persisted on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward.

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I also remembered last night that the first networking project I worked on (1983) used the term "serializer" for the part of the code that translated messages from structs in C to a series of bytes to be written out to the network transport. It had to take the struct, which logically represented the message, and output it each byte following the next onto the wire.

The authors of this code came from BB&N, so that gives you a direction in which to look for history.