From my personal memories of the 1990’s, the big breakthrough for multimedia on PCs was Windows 95. Prior to Windows 95, installing a sound card was a big pain

From my personal memories of the 1990’s, the big breakthrough for multimedia on PCs was Windows 95. Prior to Windows 95, installing a sound card was a big pain due to manually having to fiddle with IRQ allocation. In addition, many drivers were 16 bit DOS drivers and could take space from the valuable 640k DOS memory (MemMaker anyone?) Also, multimedia was often large data so programming 16bit programs with their segmented memory models was a big pain. Windows 95 really fixed a lot of those issues. It spurred the development of 32 but drivers. Plug and play made it a lot more feasible to install sound cards, etc. it was easier to write 32 but programs to process that larger data.