Historical Uses
Before the advent of USB, the parallel interface was adapted to access a number of peripheral devices other than printers. Probably one of the earliest devices to use parallel were dongles used as a hardware key form of software copy protection. Zip drives and scanners were early implementations followed by external modems, sound cards, webcams, gamepads, joysticks, external hard disk drives and CD-ROM drives. Some of the earliest portable MP3 players required a parallel port connection for transferring songs to the device. Adapters were available to run SCSI devices via parallel. Other devices such as EPROM programmers and hardware controllers could be connected via the parallel port.
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Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
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—George Grosz (1893–1959)