A LapLink cable is a cable that allows one to connect two computers together to establish a direct cable connection. The connection is achieved via the parallel ports on the two computers. No networking hardware such as a network interface card or a modem are required. The cable is named after the Laplink software package, which was designed to make such a connection possible. It can also be used by the InterLnk program in MS-DOS 6.
A LapLink cable can be seen as a parallel equivalent to a serial null modem cable. Because of the higher bandwidth of the parallel port versus the serial port, a LapLink cable is able to shift data more quickly at the same clock speed, which was important at the time it was developed since clock speeds were relatively slow. However, the clock speed of parallel interfaces is limited due to the need to synchronize all of the data bits, and high speed asynchronous serial ports are capable of higher bandwidth than parallel ports.
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