Comment by dfox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfox | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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