In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:21:53PM +0800, Kathy Quinlan wrote: > #5 Lack of Ports, the Mac has never had (correct me if I am > wrong but I believe this to be the case) parallel ports,
I'd always assumed that SCSI and PCMCIA in Macs were parallel interfaces. The problem is that Macs haven't had a built-in IBM printer port. I'm imagining that, historically, "the market" found the easy option was to be compatible with the IBM printer adaptor, and hijack it as a general-purpose communications interface with indefinite popular longevity. I assume it's also a fairly "simple" and "hackable" interface (unlike USB or FireWire), so it's cheap to get prototypes off the ground.
