The Thirty Million Line Problem [video]

Early on he argues that USB and graphics cards caused the reduction of OS from the 80s to the 90s. I would argue for the opposite correlation.

Generic ports always existed (RS232, the parallel port, ISA) and you could attach whatever you wanted to them. USB isn't a revolution in this sense.

If you take RS232 dialup modems for example, for a long time they all conformed to the hayes protocol because that was the only way to make a modem that worked on any operating system: conform to a standard.

What happened in the late 80s early 90s is that MS-DOS and Macintosh became incredibly popular, then in 95 Windows became even more popular. When you only need to support one or two operating systems following a standard becomes expensive, it's much cheaper to offload all the complicated things to a driver. And so winmodems were born.

Microsoft could have put a stop to this but, of course, they didn't, because for them it was better if you couldn't switch to linux, a macintosh or BeOS because your hardware wouldn't work.