24 Jul
2010
24 Jul
'10
2:27 p.m.
[USB-Centronics adpaters]
They work *remarkably* well with even old printers, in
my experience,
That's not too suprising. The Centronics interfaec was pretty well
standardised, and it's fairly simple anyway...
but not any other parallel-port device, AFAIK. Same as
the USB floppy
Incidentally, I've sort-of had the revers problem, but not with USB. With
HPIL. The HPIL-GPIO intefaces (HP82165, HP82166) will talk to a
Centronics printer with no problem at all. But they identify themselves
to the HPIL controller as an interface device (which they are), not a
printer. Which means some HPIL machines (the 110 nd Portable+ laptops
being obvious examples) will not recognise such a set-up as a printer and
won't print to it. This is entirely a software problem, with the right
drives it will work. Fortuantely the machine I use the most, the HP71B,
has the admirable policy that it will do what you tell it to do, even if
it may be a bad idea :-). Anf it will happily print to a Centronics
printer on the other side fo an HP82165...
drive chips: they only talk to 1.4MB drives and
can't do GCR and so
on.
I wouldn't expect them to do GCR (most PC internal controllers can't).
But I suspect they can't do FM (single density) either. Can they handle
250kbps (360K, 720K) or 300kbps (360k disks in a 1.2M dribe basically)
data rates? Or do they assume tat everything is an HD 3.5" disk?
More of the sad commoditisation of the computer industry, the descent
to a lowest-common-denominator: the X86 PC. :=AC(
But it's worse than that. Things that I can do (and do do) on my 80x86 PC
are not so easy to do on modern machines.
-tony