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During DOS days, standards or more often de-facto standards had appeared. So chip makers or board makers would make their chip or board compatible with another
by wott 10y ago
During DOS days, standards or more often de-facto standards had appeared. So chip makers or board makers would make their chip or board compatible with another existing model, and you would just need one driver per kind of device to get most of the expected functions. I am thinking of :
-- sound cards being compatible with AdLib and/or SoundBlaster and/or SoundBlaster Pro;
-- network cards being compatible with NE2000;
-- video cards being compatible with VESA standards.
Then Windows took over, buses changed, the shitfest started and never stopped. And now the shitfest comes with NDAs too.
- pcwalton 10y agoWell, we do have things like USB, Bluetooth, Intel HD Audio, ACPI, and so forth, all of which are standards. VESA is still good enough to get an unaccelerated framebuffer set up and going. Network adapters are usually at least supported by Linux, so there's some open-source reference implementation somewhere. (NDISwrapper is mostly a thing of the past, thank goodness...) Accelerated graphics is probably the biggest remaining disaster, honestly. At least with Vulkan/DX12 we might be getting thinner drivers...