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by scarface_74 990 days ago
Yes, it’s a dumb idealistic idea that never worked in practice. Geeks spent forever trying to get crappy drivers working IRQ conflicts fixed, etc.

It wasn’t until Windows 95 and WinHec and “Plug and Play” that x86 based PCs became usable for the mass market
2 comments
jandrese 990 days ago
That was largely hardware issues. In particular without a way to negotiate between drivers conflicts were doomed to happen regardless of who was writing the driver, especially with the relatively small number of resources to pull from.
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scarface_74 990 days ago
And yet, Apple’s integrated solution didn’t have those issues with the Apple // in 1977 yet alone the Mac II with Nubus in 1987.
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jandrese 989 days ago
Yeah, PC clones were a right mess. The ISA bus was extremely primitive, even by the standards of the day. There is a reason the PCI bus was such a breath of fresh air.
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yjftsjthsd-h 990 days ago
Maybe, but that's a separate matter from publishing specs that would let someone write a driver.
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scarface_74 990 days ago
How well did that work in the past when for profit companies had a motivation to write good drivers? You think it’s going to be a seamless mass market experience this time?
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yjftsjthsd-h 990 days ago
I don't see the connection. Two things appear to be true: 1. In the past, it was common to publish actual specs for talking to hardware. 2. In the past, drivers often sucked. You appear to be claiming that the first thing caused the second, but I can't see any reason for that to follow. It's not like hardware manufacturers couldn't, or indeed didn't, write their own official drivers, and on the other hand there's no reason to believe that a 3rd-party driver written using proper hardware docs wouldn't work well. In fact, it's quite reasonable to suggest that the improvement in quality is entirely tied to overall architecture improvements, mostly (as cousin comments point out) device enumeration standards and possibly OS improvements (preemptive multitasking and memory protection).
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scarface_74 990 days ago
And how slow was the evolution of both Windows and the entire ecosystem compared to Apple that could release an OS, the hardware and the drivers simultaneously? When Apple releases new hardware it can upgrade everything in tandem. It’s especially apparent now that everything Apple sells runs some variant of the same processor from the AirPods, Watches, tablets, TV set top boxes, phones and even monitors?
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felurx 989 days ago
And what would stop Apple from doing that while also having to publish documentation?
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