Talk:LPT

Re origin of LPT, I believe that this terminology in DOS descended from DEC systems.

On the DECsystem-10, at least, LPT represented the line printer (along with CDR for card reader, CDP for card punch, DSK for disk, PTR for paper tape reader, PTP for paper tape punch, DTA for DECtape, etc.). Jim 04:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Is there a de-facto standard transmission rate? I was under the impression that the protocol was synchronous and not fixed-speed. 75.162.64.104 06:16, 10 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I was under the same delusion, caused by the presence of STROBE output and ACK input ... however some helpful person has edited the article to tell us that the plain old "SPP" type of parallel port represented by the LPT standard was fixed at a whopping speed of 12,000 kbps ! *sarc* Really makes you wonder why it wasn't used more for early hard disks and the like, given that 12mbit/s (over 1.4MiByte/s) would have been pushing the limits of the physical hardware back then. (j/k)


 * (Maybe they meant 12,000 bit/s, for a 1,500 symbol/sec rate x 8-bit symbol width? 12,000 byte/sec? Who knows. I haven't got any reliable source material of my own... yet. Either would be perfectly sufficient for all but the very fastest (>2000cps) fixed-head line printers. However given that I've had speeds of nearly 1mbyte/sec out of my old ZipDisk when using the tip-top ECP (EPP?) bidirectional 8-bit modes (hijacking some of the status lines I think?), only slightly less than the ATAPI model and consistent with a 1.4mbyte/s link with a lot of switching overhead from its kludgy nature, they may be on to something. Just dreadfully confused! Also, the old Covox DAC sound device that plugged into it would give unusable audio quality at 1500 baud and barely tolerable (not much better than telephone) reproduction at 12000. I'd presume at least 19200 for it to be a realistic rival to Soundblaster (launched at 22050Hz) etc? Certainly no less than 14400~16384...) 193.63.174.11 (talk) 09:58, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Merge with Parallel port
In my opinion the LPT port and parallel port are synonyms. Moreover, the content in both articles is almost the same,

And I'd like to point out that we already have an article about Parallel communications for the general concept, that's another reason why I think that LPT and Parallel port articles should be merged. --Francisco Castro 14:02, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Parallel communications is not the same. For example the cpu and mem bus are parallel... Not sure about Merging or not LPT and Parallel Port, one is NOT the other, but maybe could be merged togeather. The person that would do that should be aware of the differences, know when its buffered or not, when every pin can be directly set or not ( for exmple is it a char device on Linux?) This is the reason all these USB to Parallel ports do not work for e.g., CNC but are ok for printers.(I am currently trying to find out whats the story, after having bought one of these myself...:S)217.5.158.82 (talk) 14:52, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Malplaced attempts
See WP:MALPLACED, and use WP:RM to change from the current primary topic for "LPT" to no primary topic for "LPT" by moving the disambiguation page here. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:27, 27 May 2013 (UTC)