4 Jul
2006
4 Jul
'06
4:31 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7/3/2006 at 10:07 AM Jules Richardson wrote:
Just seems strange - but I wonder if it was a marketing move and they
deliberately crippled the port? Maybe there was some plan for an I/O board
that could be sold (doubtless at great expense) to anyone wanting to use their
PC for control purposes.
In fact, maybe that was another intended use (which never happened) for the
board that's used to connect a PC to the expansion chassis? (I've never seen
or looked at details of one of those boards - but presumably it's full of
generic I/O lines)
cheers
Jules
Lack of power on the parallel port's a
strange one - I always found it
hard to believe that the implementors didn't forsee the use of the port as
a
general-purpose output port and provide it with a
couple of power pins.
It's not like there aren't several grounds available so that couple could
have
been given up for +5V pins.
Given the implementation of the port, I don't believe that any use beyond a
printer port was foreseen at the time of product release.