What's the operating system of the laptop? In DOS-based operating systems (e.g. MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 95, Windows Me) you can access the parallel port directly using the language's I/O port routines (I know, for example, that Pascal allows you to write to Port[$387] for LPT1, or to run inline assembly routines). With Windows NT-based operating systems (e.g. Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP), you need to use some driver that provides the appropriate access routines—it's more difficult, but also more robust. If it's not Windows or DOS, I wouldn't know.
Try
this for some information on parallel ports under a DOS-based system (in Pascal, but easy to understand).