[mrguyorama]

>When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing

It absolutely is not! I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and automatic everything was. It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual driver installation or anything. Things just worked after a reboot.

Early versions of NT (pre 2000) were not consumer oriented and that's why they were more finicky, but by the time of XP, you could expect it to just work with mostly anything again.

[bacchusracine]

> I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and automatic everything was. It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual driver installation or anything.

A virtual machine you say? With a virtualized set of hardware prechosen for compatibility so that Windows would recognize it without issues? It just recognized this collection of virtual hardware selected for compatibility without further interactions? You don't say? ;)

As someone who began with Windows 95 OSR2 on real hardware you will forgive my amusement I hope?

[mrguyorama]

No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows just kinda found it.

And don't make assumptions about me, our 1996 toshiba came with OSR2, including beta USB drivers and more built in driver profiles for commodity hardware than the plug and play "pick device" window actually could handle (it wasn't resizeable!)

By the time of OSR2, and then 98, if your device had been reviewed in a PC magazine, you could probably just plug it in, select it from a list, and go on your way.

[bacchusracine]

>No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows just kinda found it.

~woosh!~