[bluedino]

In the early-ish days of Linux (2001 or so), I had a friend who wanted to use certain scanners and modems and things that didn't have any support. I used to always tell him 'just write a driver for it', not realizing how complicated it would be.

I was always frustrated when we'd try to install Linux on some cheap PC from Best Buy that had a newer integrated video card that wouldn't run X at anything other than 640x480 with 16 colors, if even that.

I knew a little VGA programming from my DOS days but an actual video driver was a mystery. It was probably the guys who used to work on stuff like these OS/2 video drivers who ended up writing those things for Linux.