that it's possible to generate appropriate baud rates from 12 MHz. I've got one circuit right here that does that. Further, if a manufacturer wants to demonstrate his hardware doing useful work he MUST provide an external UART for use by the board-resident monitor, if there is one, else he prevents the use of the on-board serial port for the end-user's target application.

You're right, of course, in that a debugging scheme doesn't have to use the on-board serial port for debugging. It would seem, nowever, that most of the "evaluation" boards out there do just that. In some cases one can use JTAG or some other scheme specifically supported by the MCU hardware. The dedicated hardware is certainly better than having to share a single serial port between a debugger and a target serial application. However, the "real" i805x doesn't have that feature. There simply aren't enough pins.

Simulators claiming to provide precise timing data, don't cover all the available MCU's, even those that fit the classic 40 or 44 pin sites.

True, not all MCU's have two serial channels. Not all applications even care whether there's a serial channel available.

I still didn't see many applications that actually use the < 4800 baud rates, but I saw enough to suggest that they're certainly not gone forever. There was, however, only one that used that old 110 baud. There are MANY frequencies that produce precise multiples of the standard rates, with the exception of 110. The question remains the same, I guess. Why are so many users resigned to using 11.0592 MHz when 11.9808 or even 12.000 will work adequately?

RE