Lpt

LPT

LPT (Line Print Terminal or Local Print Terminal) is the original, and still common, name of the parallel port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers. It was designed to operate a text printer that used IBM's 8-bit extended ASCII character set. The name derives from the fact that "line printer" was a common generic term at the time for any type of text printer. Graphical printers, along with a host of other devices, have been designed to communicate with the system. It was a de facto industry standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s. Today, the parallel port interface is seeing decreasing use because of the rise of Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, along with network printing using Ethernet.