That's exactly the distinction. "Parallel Port" meant two things in the PC world:
* An ad hoc standard descended from Centronics printers for transferring data on a 7 bit parallel TTL bus.
* The IBM PC Parallel Port Interface, an extremely simple (like four chips!) 8086 ioport based controller for the various lines in the port that was used for decades as a general GPIO interface for whatever gadgets you wanted to hack together.
To the enduring shame of everyone involved in the disaster, the USB standardization process for "parallel port" treated only the first definition. It only does data transfer at the line level, there's no individual control over the wires as there is for the PC interface.
It's basically useless, unless your problem really is to connect a printer to your USB host. That said, there are proper USB GPIO controllers out there. But DOS software written to the old standard (and there was a lot of it!) is unrunnable junk now.
* An ad hoc standard descended from Centronics printers for transferring data on a 7 bit parallel TTL bus.
* The IBM PC Parallel Port Interface, an extremely simple (like four chips!) 8086 ioport based controller for the various lines in the port that was used for decades as a general GPIO interface for whatever gadgets you wanted to hack together.
To the enduring shame of everyone involved in the disaster, the USB standardization process for "parallel port" treated only the first definition. It only does data transfer at the line level, there's no individual control over the wires as there is for the PC interface.
It's basically useless, unless your problem really is to connect a printer to your USB host. That said, there are proper USB GPIO controllers out there. But DOS software written to the old standard (and there was a lot of it!) is unrunnable junk now.