I was researching some motherboards for work, we needed a current chipset (intel i3/i5/i7) and 4 actual serial ports.
I stumbled across these guys:
http://www.ibase.com.tw/2009/product...y=motherboards
They have a huge range of motherboards with real, honest to goodness serial ports (i.e. RS232 COM Ports) built in.
Everything from full size boards with multiple PCI slots to tiny boards the size of a floppy disc with integrated CPUs.
Anyone looking to do a computer build and not wanting to mess with USB -> Serial converters might be interested in one of these. You could make a tiny system for the observatory instead of a laptop.