can rPi drive PC-bidirectional Par-port?

The PC printer ports were bidirectional at least in the sense that they had five status inputs which could be used as data inputs. Even the control outputs could be fairly easily used as inputs which meant a total 9 input pins.

Bidirectional ports have a control bit to set the data pins to inputs or outputs or to be exact, eanble or disable the output drivers.

So, probably you can talk to a PC parallel port but I'd rather use ethernet or serial (RS-232) for PC communication.

Yes but, I want to interface to the most primitive PCs. Ethernet is a higher level of complication. And IIRC RS232 won't interface with rPi's 3.3V [MOS ?], but par-port will.

WDYS?

You primitive PCs will likely have a 5V par port? Maybe not so bad when it is still TTL, but when it is MOS...?

For RS232 you can put a MAX-3222 or MAX-3232 inbetween.

He has to define "primitive". That Sun 3/50 someone gave me has ethernet, but Macs of that vintage didn't. It was't until relatively recent times that ethernet becamse common (after things like ARCnet), but I think you can go back 20 years and while ethernet wasn't standard, there were cards for the ISA bus in the "IBM PC". Of course, you'd need an operating system that would make use of the ethernet card.

Michael

No. you needed some third party software.

And don't forget token ring as well..

Please can we forget token ring?

but there were *no* collisions!

Dropped tokens instead. And devices dropping off the ring. And the scabbiest network connectors I've ever seen. Give me ethernet collisions every time.

But when it died it killed the whole network requiring hundreds of systems to re-start.

Plus the damn cards and hubs cost a fortune.

In the end that's what killed it, or would have been sufficient to kill it.

Ethernet was good enough and much cheaper.