Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Enhanced Parallel Port/Extended Capabilities Port

Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) was created by Intel, Xircom and Zenith in 1991. EPP allows for much more data, 500 kilobytes to 2 megabytes, to be transferred each second. It was targeted specifically for non-printer devices that would attach to the parallel port, particularly storage devices that needed the highest possible transfer rate.
Close on the heels of the introduction of EPP, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard jointly announced a specification called Extended Capabilities Port (ECP) in 1992. While EPP was geared toward other devices, ECP was designed to provide improved speed and functionality for printers in 1994, the IEEE 1284 standard was released. It included the two specifications for parallel port devices, EPP and ECP. In order for them to work, both the operating system and the device must support the required specification. This is seldom a problem today since most computers support SPP, ECP and EPP and will detect which mode needs to be used, depending on the attached device. If you need to manually select a mode, you can do so through the BIOS on most computers.

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