What are the differences between a parallel port and a serial port?
Parallel ports are easy to program and faster compared to the serial ports. But main disadvantage is it needs more number of transmission lines. Because of this reason parallel ports are not used in long distance communications. Let us know the basic difference between working of parallel port and serial port. In serial ports, there will be two data lines: One transmission and one receive line. To send a data in serial port, it has to be sent one bit after another with some extra bits like start bit, stop bit and parity bit to detect errors. But in parallel port, all the 8 bits of a byte will be sent to the port at a time and a indication will be sent in another line. There will be some data lines, some control and some handshaking lines in parallel port. If three bytes of data 01000101 10011100 10110011 is to be sent to the port, parallel port communication is faster then serial port.