From there, designers began to come up with more uses for the parallel port,
including external hard drive, CD-ROM drives, and modems. But it all came to a
screeching halt with the introduction of the high-speed USB port; today there
are very few new peripherals that don’t make use of either a USB or wired or
wireless network connection. (You may still find some devices that offer both a
USB and parallel port to maintain compatibility with older computers.)So, what do you do if you need to connect your new parallel port-less laptop to
an older printer? The best solution is adapt a USB port to stack up its serially
spaced bits and output them as if they were coming from a parallel adapter.One such device is Keyspan’s appropriately named USB Parallel Printer Transfer
Cable. One end plugs in to your laptop’s USB port and the other end of the cable
into the incoming parallel port on a printer. There’s nothing more to do: Plug in
both devices and you’re back to the future. An alternative is Keyspan’s Mini Port
Replicator, which attaches to a USB port on your laptop and delivers — in a
package smaller than a deck of cards — a serial port, a parallel port, and two
USB ports for other devices. You can see both adapters in Figure 16-1.Figure 16-1:
This pair
of plug-
and-play
external
commu-
nications
devices
expand on
a laptop’s
facilities. At
left is the
Keyspan
Mini Port
Replicator,
and at right
the Keyspan
USB Parallel
Printer
Transfer
Cable.248 Part IV: Failing to Communicate