cent(7)

NAME

cent − Centronics-compatible interface

REMARKS

This manual entry applies only to peripherals connected to the cent interfaces found on Series 300, 400, and 700 systems.

DESCRIPTION

cent is a simple, widely used communication protocol most commonly associated with printers, plotters and scanners. It is an eight bit parallel data interface with additional control signals from the host commputer, and status signals from the peripheral.

The model for the cent interface drivers is simple in that no character processing is done; i.e., no interpretation is applied to the data being transferred between computer and peripheral. Therefore, all bytes sent to or received from a device are handled without alteration. In other words, the cent interface drivers always operate in raw mode which means that any desired data interpretation must be performed by a user program (such as the lp spooler in conjunction with an appropriate model file).

DEPENDENCIES

Series 300/400
A wide variety of control functions are supported. See Device I/O Library (gpio∗(3I), (hpib∗(3I), and (io∗(3I), entries in Section 3 of this manual.

Series 700
Only write (output) operations are supported.

AUTHOR

cent was developed by HP.

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