JetScootr t1_ja2x7gr wrote on February 26, 2023 at 1:19 PM

Reply to comment by GalFisk in ELI5: in MS-DOS there were not-interchangeable audio cards and we had to manually select it to get sound, otherwise there was none at all. When and why this stopped being a problem? by 3RBlank

>mostly just worked

GalFisk t1_ja2y1bs wrote on February 26, 2023 at 1:27 PM

Yeah, I lived through the early "plug and pray" days.

And for some damn reason, printers seem to still be stuck in that age. My most upvoted post on ELI5 yet was me expounding upon the sorry state of the printing subsystem in Windows.

JetScootr t1_ja2yclp wrote on February 26, 2023 at 1:30 PM

Odd, when you consider other (ie, mainframe) OSes had no problems with printers. Printer tech was already marching forward even before the PC revolution started because of the massive use mainframes made of printers.

Rampage_Rick t1_ja4m1wn wrote on February 26, 2023 at 8:24 PM

Remember when USB started rolling out around the time of Win95 OSR2.1?

GalFisk t1_ja4rtxc wrote on February 26, 2023 at 9:03 PM

Ha ha, I'd rather not.

I remember at my first job, the network stack of Win95 rev A would sometimes crap itself, permanently. We had to reinstall Windows on a few computers.

USB printing is still a mess. Windows still defaults to the ancient LPT1 port when it doesn't know what to do, and the USB "port" for printing is a hack.

And don't get me started on network "WSD" ports.

And everything is totally opaque, so when something goes wrong, you can't inspect, troubleshoot or fix the actual issue. Remove, reinstall, pray...