Centronics Interface

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A Centronics cable used beetween printer and Commodre Userport.

A Centronics interface was a printer interface with bi-directional parallel communications that became the defacto standard in the 1980s. Today it is known as IEEE-1284 and was developed by the closed American printer company Centronics in the 1970s.

The Centronics interfaces is also used by old homecomputers like C64/128 or VIC-20 as userport for connection a printer parallel interface cable to a printer with Centronics interface. Also exists cartrdiges for this home computers that supports the Centronics cable and interface.

Older printers with a Centronics port are Star NL-10, MPS 1250, MPS 1500C, MPS 1270, MPS 1230

To this day, this parallel printer interface is still present on many computers and printers, but is increasingly being displaced by the USB interface.

In 1994, the Centronics interface gave rise to the IEEE-1284 standard for a parallel interface for the bidirectional transmission of data between computers and various peripheral devices (mostly printers, but also scanners and data drives).

Links[edit | edit source]

WP-W11.png Wikipedia: IEEE_1284