I have a very very old PC that is running DOS and using an ISA card to receive the data from an old fashioned testing device. What I want to do is attach the Printer (LPT) wire to the old PC and attach another PC with linux to the other side of the wire. The linux pc should behave like its a printer device so it can receive the data which should be printed. Following up I want to interpret this data,...
How can I get the data sent to printer by attaching linux pc to the printer side of the wire?
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Standard PC hardware can not emulate a parallel printer. You can buy adapters which are intended to connect a serial printer to a parallel printer port and use them to connect the computers.
If the DOS program uses the DOS API to print you can redirect print output to a serial port using the MODE command, or possibly send data over a network, or write a program to send the data via the parallel port using a suitable protocol for direct connection to another PC.
See http://people.redhat.com/twaugh/parport/html/parportguide.html for instructions on programming the parallel port in Linux. See http://www.easysw.com/~mike/serial/ for serial port programming.
The data format is likely to be plain text, ESC/P formatted text or ESC/P graphics.
You basically don't even need linux on the other machine.
There is something called the
INTERLNKandINTERSVRthat comes bundled with MSDOS.You can use that to make the file sharing work from DOS using a parallel port.
Here is a guide that connects two PCs in DOS mode.
Considering your PC is quite old, this might not work for you because INTERNK and INTERSVR are available with MSDOS 6.22 and later versions only.
I would suggest to use a bootable floppy to get the correct MSDOS version and use this technique- fairly simple guide link above.
P.S: Make sure you have the correct wires - You can read the "whole" discussion in comments here to understand what wire can be used for what.
Hope this helps!