jjim, when they came out and for MANY years afterwards, parallel ports were considered high speed, up untill a couple handful of years ago you could still buy external hard drives that used a parallel port, I even have a couple of Xircom ethernet adapters floating around that work on a parallel port. Though very little used most printer ports on PCs are capable of using ECP mode which allows data transfer rates in the neighboorhood of 1 or 2 megabytes per second. According to specs at least ECP maxes out at 2.5 megabytes per second (ideal conditions and hardware) that's twice as fast as standard 10mbit ethernet.