Klaus, thanks I should have known it was powered from the port. That's extremely handy actually. Perfect for TTL logic, imagine that! *grin*
John, the gender is right, that's the first thing I checked. I went over all four spec sheets I found on the web very closely. They are similar, but not the same.
In the end I didn't end up trying this circuit, I went with a simpler parallel port design, that only makes use of two pins and that works. The code that depends on the input from the port is very chunky because it waits on a signal. I might try out the serial version and see if I can get it to work more smoothly, but unlikely I think.