what is an LPT port ?

Hi everyone ,i have heard about a parallel port in PCs called LPT ,which can be programmed ,i loved the idea so i need some info about this port ....
thanks

 

One caution about using LPT (or Parallel-Port) printers. Microsoft has reached a saturation point for including 'standard printer drivers' in recent releases of Windows, and when they stop shipping an old printer's drivers (and they have), a user must put on their Sherlock cap to deduce which 'standard driver' can properly function with these older printers.

Modern LPT ports - at least the last five years of them (2000-2005?) - allowed 'bi-directional' data so the parallel (printer) cable could send back acknowledgements to the computer. "Yes, I'm functioning/No, I'm not." "Paper is jammed." "I'm out of ink."

These handy details also complicate those 'standard printer drivers' and stretch a user's deductive powers because one printer model's PAPER-JAM code might be another printer's REPLACE-INK. Or more likely, PAPER DRAWER # is coded in the opposite direction - Last Paper Drawer vs. First, for example, leaving the user to figure out which paper drawer can be accessed thru modern Windows when the printer thinks no paper drawer exists.

I enjoyed having 2 LPT ports on an old computer - one would be to a color-capable printer, and one to a continuous-form dot-matrix. And some software would save the LPT# as part of the document, itself, defaulting to that preferred LPT1 or LPT2. Very handy.