Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

Back in those days, Windows had an absolute lock on the industry for several reasons:

1: it was the incumbent

2: there were no hardware drivers for any other operating system

3: there was software for Microsoft operating systems, and no useful software for any other OS

4: Microsoft has legal contracts with the hardware manufacturers which required that a icense fee be paid regardless of whether or not Windows shipped with each machine.

5: probably more reasons

As an outcome of the above it turned out to be impossible for any other OS to get a foothold on the PC. It's hgard for people to understand now, but there was still an opening for some other OS to get a foothold.

In the end, another OS turned up and started making major headway on the PC. It succeeded against Windows in the way that such battles tend to be played out - by playing to a different set of rules. That OS of course was Linux and its rules were to be free, to have a collaborative development model, to be server focused, and to have the fortunate timing of being at the start of the era of connected computing. I remember being startled that I could get a free operating system by buying an issue of a computer magazine at the newsagent with a CDROM on the front containing Linux.

Eventually the seemingly impossible happened and an OS came along that beat Microsoft on the desktop, or at least competed effectively with Microsoft Windows - and that of course was OSX. And OSX against succeeded by playing to its own rules. No need for hardware drivers for every device under the sun because they it only ran on Apple hardware. It had applications from the Macintosh user base (and Microsoft), and turned out to be a really nicely integrated and functional OS (IMO).

Its a pity GEOS didn't make headway, at the time I really wanted SOMETHING, ANYTHING to give Microsoft effective competition because it looked back then like it was going to be 1,000 years of Microsoft in first place with no second, third or fourth place runners up.

BeOS also gets points for having a try at competing with Microsoft.

Back in those days, mostly nobody cared about driver support. In Windows 3.1, there were three classes of things that you could even install driver for: graphics cards (if you wanted more than 640x480, which most people didn't care about), printers (windows had ~70 different drivers, on the other hand most printers were compatible with some defacto standard) and other devices which effectively were sound cards.

Both windows and geos mostly relied on DOS and BIOS for things like filesystem and block device access, so for scsi disks, zip drives and similar you either needed DOS driver or just correct BIOS ROM module on the card.

This only changed with Windows 95, which still could use DOS drivers, but reliability and performance suffered in that case. Native 32bit windows drivers were built on top of Plug and Play model, which has the unfortunate feature that given device is either recognized by windows automatically or needs specific driver for that specific device (surprising amount of these "drivers" are plain text files that just map the device id onto some standard windows driver).

While I agree with you, saying that nobody cared for driver support because it was provided by DOS leaves out some people: other OS vendors :)

Microsoft sidestepped the issue at first by building Windows on top of DOS but even they had to tackle it head on for Windows 95, as you say. Everyone else, though, was basically doomed to be locked out of the market because of this issue.

Essentially all 86/286 PC OSes have some level of compatibility with MS-DOS drivers (either because they are compatible reimplementations of DOS or CP/M derivates with some level of DOS compatibility).

Also for many hardware devices in DOS days there simply were no "drivers", but each program that wanted to use given piece of hardware had to communicate with said device directly.

DOS itself provided interface for block devices (with weird extension mechanism for things like ATAPI), semi-documented API for installable filesystems (meant for network drives, but also useful for ISO 9660), mostly unused abstraction for some character devices and print spooler which included exactly one printer driver (for some IBM printer that most people didn't even ever see).

The 32b windows VxD/WDM PnP model seems like perfect (and probably unintentional) marketing for MS, because it exposes the fact that there are drivers and that said drivers are not available for OS XYZ to the users, while it can be perfectly the case that there are no third party drivers for given device for OS XYZ because they are not needed (either OS XYZ already contains drivers for such device or the device simply implements some standard interface).

I'm still struggling to think of what drivers would actually count here, depending on what time period we're talking about. Early 80s? Late 80s (Win3)?. INT 21h file services?

It was the era when DOS games didn't use "video drivers", they all wrote directly to the VGA registers. Similarly for sound cards: you could buy a Soundblaster or (if you were rich enough) a Gravis Ultrasound, and other manufacturers cloned the hardware API directly. Games later tended to come with "DOS4GW", which was effectively a 32-bit operating system that could load from and return to DOS.

My recollection was that availability of hardware drivers was a huge issue and a major barrier for operating systems attempting to take on windows.

That is true, but GEOS predates these times by quite a lot of time. IIRC the last Geoworks-branded release was few months before release of Windows 95.

Office. The parts of Office basically killed off everything that competed with it. Office helped sell Windows and vice versa. Anyone who tried to compete had to do something radical and only Apple had radical (once Steve returned) since they had their own hardware. Competing with Microsoft back then is something I had a lot of experience of, and the failures to prove it.

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