24 Jul
2010
24 Jul
'10
1:59 p.m.
On 24 July 2010 21:19, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Right... Pity...
They work *remarkably* well with even old printers, in my experience,
but not any other parallel-port device, AFAIK. Same as the USB floppy
drive chips: they only talk to 1.4MB drives and can't do GCR and so
on.
More of the sad commoditisation of the computer industry, the descent
to a lowest-common-denominator: the X86 PC. :?(
The next jump will be more interesting: 32-bit OSs basically can't
usefully handle >4GB of RAM, nor can the main ones handle >2GB drives.
Both are becoming common.
I think we might be on the brink of a jump to an all-64 bit world of
x86 PCs that always have multicore chips, ship with >4GB of RAM and
For now, almost exclusively notebooks and portables and a very small
number of ultra-small-form-factor devices. But that sector will grow
and the desktop one will shrink, so, longer term, true.
I think some desktops will be around for "power users" for a long time
to come, though.
--
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Just out of curiousity, do the USB-parallel adapters
support all the
low-level bit-twiddling that you can do on a real PC printer port? Can
you treat them as 12 digital outputs and 5 inputs?
Nope,. They generally appear as a DOT4 printer device; in other words,
they make a parallel printer appear to the system to be a USB printer,
not the USB port appear to be a parallel port. 2GB drives, which is going to accelerate the death of
Windows XP and
indeed Vista, and give the whole PC industry a shove to move to EFI,
killing the BIOS and DOS compatibility. But 64-bit Window also drops
the 16-bit subsystem, so DOS and 16-bit Windows apps will disappear
too.
I'm not saying this is a good thing in all ways. In some, it'll be a
shame. But the PC is about to shed the last remnants of its days as an
8/16-bit DOS-compatible. That is interesting, at least.
But if you
need the port, what's wrong with a Centronics parallel port
or a couple of RS232 ports on a PCI card? They are the "real thing",
AFAIK.
Nothing, provide the host machine has a PCI slot. There seem to be an
awful lot of modern PCs that have USB as the only expansion.