First introduced in 1970, parallel ports were originally designed to connect business computers to printers. With their inclusion on the IBM PC in the early 1980s, they became an industry standard.

It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high.

Q. I have several DOS programs that I still use, running under the DOS prompt in Windows 98. One of them provides printer output, but only to the parallel port. My printer is connected to a USB port.

I have been working with computers since the late 70s, and that's not for boasting purposes, but to tell you where I come from. When I started, I was always told to NEVER plug/unplug the following ...

Many laser printers last for years, so businesses often keep older laser printers around even after upgrading other hardware. Many older laser printers use a parallel port interface rather than the ...

Get something like this to properly add a hardware parallel port to a computer.<BR><BR>If you're stuck with something like a notebook or a SFF computer where that's not an option then unfortunately ...