Parallel port

A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface. It is also known as a printer port or Centronics port. It was an industry de facto standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined the Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) and Extended Capability Port (ECP) bi-directional versions. Today, the parallel port interface is virtually non-existent because of the rise of Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices, along with network printing using Ethernet.

The parallel port interface was originally known as the Parallel Printer Adapter on IBM PC-compatible computers. It was primarily designed to operate a line printer that used IBM's 8-bit extended ASCII character set to print text, but could also be used to adapt other peripherals. Graphical printers, along with a host of other devices, have been designed to communicate with the system.

LPT (disambiguation)

LPT is the designation of a parallel port interface on some computer systems.

LPT may refer to:

See also

DOS

DOS /dɒs/, short for disk operating system, is an acronym for several computer operating systems that were operated by using the command line.

MS-DOS dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 including the partially MS-DOS-based Microsoft Windows (95, 98, and Millennium Edition). "DOS" is used to describe the family of several very similar command-line systems, including MS-DOS, PC DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, ROM-DOS, and PTS-DOS.

In spite of the common usage, none of these systems were simply named "DOS" (a name given only to an unrelated IBM mainframe operating system in the 1960s). A number of unrelated, non-x86 microcomputer disk operating systems had "DOS" in their names, and are often referred to simply as "DOS" when discussing machines that use them (e.g. AmigaDOS, AMSDOS, ANDOS, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, CSI-DOS, ProDOS, and TRSDOS). While providing many of the same operating system functions for their respective computer systems, programs running under any one of these operating systems would not run under others.