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The parallel port interface was originally known as the Parallel Printer Adapter on IBM PC-compatible computers. It was primarily designed to operate printers that used IBM's eight-bit extended ASCII character set to print text, but could also be used to adapt other peripherals.
An IEEE 1284 36-pin male micro ribbon printer cable connection. The computer side normally uses a DB-25 port instead of this connector. IEEE 1284, also known as the Centronics port, is a standard that defines bi-directional parallel communications between computers and other devices.
Printer cable refers to the cable that carries data between a computer and a printer. There are many different types of cables, for example: Serial: RS-232, EIA-422; Parallel; FireWire; USB; Parallel port printers have been slowly phased out, and are now difficult to find for the most part, being considered as an obsolete legacy port on most ...
Furthermore, DB-25s were commonly used for RS-232 serial cables and also to connect parallel printers, meaning that users might accidentally try to use completely inappropriate cables, since the printer and serial cables would fit the connector properly and be hard to visually distinguish.
A solution was to use, at the time, a standard parallel port, typically used for connection to a printer or similar output device. The ports on two computers are connected with a so-called null-printer cable, sometimes called a LapLink cable.
In 1975, Centronics formed an OEM agreement with Tandy and produced DMP and LP series printers for several years. The 6000 series band printers were introduced in 1978. By 1979 company revenues were over $100 million. In 1980, the Mini-Printer Model 770 was introduced—a small, low-cost desktop serial matrix printer.
Computer ports in common use cover a wide variety of shapes such as round (PS/2, etc.), rectangular (FireWire, etc.), square (Telephone plug), trapezoidal (D-Sub — the old printer port was a DB-25), etc. There is some standardization to physical properties and function.
In general, parallel interfaces are quoted in B/s and serial in bit/s. The more commonly used is shown below in bold type. On devices like modems , bytes may be more than 8 bits long because they may be individually padded out with additional start and stop bits; the figures below will reflect this.
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