What is a virtual port?
Printers can also reside on a virtual port for much the same reasons. All printers used to plug into a parallel port (an LPT port) on the computer. As a result many legacy programs were written with the assumption that any printers would be located on an LPT port. When USB printers became commonplace it became necessary to allow these USB printers to be assinged a virtual parallel port in order to maintain compatibility with these older programs. This can be configured in the OS in the printers settings and is most often used for DOS-level point-of-sale or data-entry applications.
