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.

All PCs have a parallel port, and very useful it is too. On the vast majority of computers this 25-pin socket is used by the printer, however in recent years a growing number of other devices have ...

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.

ANSWER: The most obvious difference is size. The parallel port on the back of your computer is a 25-pin port, while the serial port has room for nine pins. But the real difference is in the way they ...

The USB port is something most of us take for granted. You plug in a phone, keyboard, or one of the many useful USB gadgets out there, and it just works. But not too long ago, this was basically ...

In the olden days, plugging something into your computer—a mouse, a printer, a hard drive—required a zoo of cables. Maybe you needed a PS/2 connector or a serial port, the Apple Desktop Bus, or a DIN ...

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.

Iomega’s Zip drives filled an interesting niche back in the 1990s. A magnetic disk that was physically floppy-sized, but much larger in capacity– starting at 100 MB, and reaching 750 MB by the ...