Centronics

~ the obit ~

Centronics started in 1971 in Hudson, New Hampshire, founded by Robert Howard and Samuel Lang after Wang Laboratories spun out its printer work. The Model 101 had been shown at the National Computer Conference in May 1970: a seven-wire solenoid impact head running at 165 characters a second, built to a price that put a printer on a desk rather than in a machine room. It was the right product at the moment when minicomputers were arriving in places that had never had a computer before.

The business grew fast on that. Revenue passed a hundred million dollars by 1979, and 1985 brought $126 million, sixty-five of it from building the IBM 4214 under contract. For most of the decade Centronics was the volume name in impact printing, which is a sentence that sounds small until you remember that in 1979 a printer was the only way a computer said anything you could keep.

Then the Japanese manufacturers arrived. Epson and Okidata built better dot-matrix mechanisms for less money, and Centronics spent the mid-1980s losing the category it had created. In 1987 it sold the entire printer business to GENICOM for $87 million. The corporate shell kept the stock listing and the name for a while, bought Ekco Housewares for $125 million in 1988, and became Ekco Group, Inc. A company that made printers turned into a company that made kitchen pans, using the same ticker.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the connector ~

Here is the part that outlasted everything. To connect the Model 101 to a host, Centronics defined an interface: eight data lines plus a strobe and a handful of status pins, carried on a 36-pin ribbon plug held in place by two wire clips. It was not submitted to any standards body. IBM adopted it for the PC in 1981 with a 25-pin D-sub on the computer end, and after that every printer in the world had the 36-pin version on the back because every cable in the world already did.

Every machine I owned between 1998 and about 2005 had that port. LPT1 on the back, next to the serial one nobody used, and the cable was thick and grey with the chunky end that snapped into the printer under your desk. You configured it in the BIOS and argued about whether ECP or EPP mode would make the scanner work. The company whose name was stamped into that connector had already stopped existing when I was three years old, and nobody I knew had any idea it had ever been a company at all.

~ the funny part ~

GENICOM ran the printer business until its own Chapter 11 filing in 2000, after which what was left merged with Tally to become TallyGenicom. Ekco Group did well enough making housewares that it was bought by World Kitchen in 1999. So the printer half and the cookware half of what was once a New Hampshire computer company both outlived the computer company, in different industries, for over a decade each.

The interface kept going the longest. USB began replacing it around 1998 and the parallel port finally dropped off consumer motherboards in the mid-2000s, which puts the connector's working life at roughly thirty-five years and the company's at sixteen. Industrial machines and dongle-locked CNC controllers still use it. If you want a parallel port today you buy a PCIe card, and the product listing will call it a Centronics interface, because that is still the only name it has.

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