Been 'There', Done 'That'. First memory system I remember was 16 Kbytes of Core supported by a DEC Tape. That was State of the Art in 1972. Interesting to hear about your experience with RS232, mine was pretty much the same, not well defined Standards (only 485 was worse).
Here is where I am with the problem. Yes, one has to configure the UART in the Cable. The cable I have is from Cablecreation using a PL-2303 chip set. No instructions were included. Going to the Cablecreation Web site is of little help, almost nothing works. They say to set up the PL-2303 chip set all one has to do is to plug the cable into a USB port if using Windows 10, and the 'Wizard' will guide you through the set up. Yeah, Right! Plugging the cable into a known working usb port of a Dell computer operating Windows 10 gets absolutely no response, it is not detected. I asked for support on the Cablecreation Web site and less than reassuring. There is no way to load the Drivers for Windows 10 other than using the 'Wizard' which does not come up when the cable is plugged in.
What I decided to do was to send the Cablecreation cable back and order one that uses the FTDI chipset. They appear to have a much more user friendly Web site, and a method for downloading the correct Drivers. Also, RTS/CTS is definitely supported.
I will pick the Thread up again in a few days when I receive the new cable.
Thanks everyone for your replies, they are appreciated!