Comment by zdragnar
1 day ago
It's been a few years now, but I know a major manufacturer had some windows XP boxes around because they were the newest hardware/software they could get with native parallel port support to interface with their machines.
To give you an idea of the complexity of the manufacturing lines, shutting the machines down and starting them back up again was measured in days. Upgrading them would be obscenely expensive, let alone replacing them, just in the opportunity cost of not making anything alone.
For anyone that needs true native serial & parallel ports, a Dell Latitude E series laptop (or Precision 7xx0) with docking station is an easily-available option.
The last machines with dock port have 6th gen Core CPUs (Latitude E5x70), or 7th gen for Precision 7x20.
I don't really know the full details, as it was my brother who worked there and we just chatted over beers, but I believe the software itself that communicated over the parallel ports was 16 bit, and that (along with the native ports) was the reason they kept the old windows XP machines around.
It is possible, perhaps almost a certainly, that the company did not own the source code for the application and could or would not attempt to rewrite it to work with a modern operating system.
This is a top brand name company, so it isn't like they couldn't throw money at the problem, but with the number of lines in the number of plants they had, there wasn't really any reason to not keep the old hardware running (sans Internet connection).
Not as pure, but for what it's worth I've had success with a Syba SD-PEX50023 in applications where USB-based parallel port emulation failed.