It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high.

Despite the rise of ARM processors in more and more computers from embedded systems to daily driver PCs, the x86 architecture maintains a stronghold in the computing space that won’t be going away ...

Q. I have several DOS programs that I still use, running under the DOS prompt in Windows 98. One of them provides printer output, but only to the parallel port. My printer is connected to a USB port.

I have been working with computers since the late 70s, and that's not for boasting purposes, but to tell you where I come from. When I started, I was always told to NEVER plug/unplug the following ...

So I'm trying to detect through Visual Basic 6.0 when a voltage change occurs on one of the pins of the serial/parallel port. The whole thing is pretty simple; no data transfer/handshaking/etc needs ...

For portable-sensing and data- acquisition applications, a laptop computer and its parallel port (LPT) make good bedfellows. Yet in the effort to extend battery life, many microprocessors and entire ...

John is a writer at Pocket-lint. He is passionate about all things technology, and is always keeping up with the latest smartphone and PC releases. John has previously written at MobileSyrup. When ...