(Homonym: cereal).
1. Pertaining to or occurring in or producing a series; or.
2. (Music) Pertaining to or composed in serial technique.
A serialized set of programs; SYN. series.
(Computer science) Of or relating to the sequential performance of multiple operations; SYN. nonparallel.
One by one. For example, in serial transmission, information is transferred one bit at a time; a serial computer has only one arithmetic logic unit, which must execute the whole program one step at a time. Compare parallel (definition 3).