[mdlug] Linux push an economic phenomenon?

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Dan Pritts

> I am SURE that things are better now.  Someone mentioned buying a
thinkpad
> with linux preinstalled, that is just awesome.

 They *are* much better. One major factor is that hardware standards are
much more comprehensive and stringent these days.

 Back when I started, you had ISA and VESA, maybe PCI or MicroChannel.
Not only would you have to manually configure a lot of those buses,
there wasn't really a standard for much of anything on top of those
buses. Even a serial port would need some particular driver. IDE hard
drives had multiple slightly-incompatible operating modes, and could not
be autoconfigured.

 USB has its issues, but one thing it did was inaugurate the days of a
standard that covered not just electrical signals but software
interfaces. And not just for the bus, but for the devices connected to
it. You want to hook up a scanner or camera? There's a spec for that. A
keyboard or joystick or gamepad? A spec for that too. A hard drive or a
flash drive? How about a CD or DVD burner? Specs for those, too.
Scanners, printers, network interfaces, even sound hardware. Specs for
everyone!

 The IDE spec has evolved to SATA and beyond, and allows negotiation of
features, automatic configuration, etc. Even VGA monitors gained the
ability to tell the computer now what resolutions they could support,
and now DVI and HDMI have come which *demand* autoconfiguration. Even on
the low level, PCI Express and so forth have strict standards and
autoconfiguration. And laptops mostly use the same specs. They *have*
to.

 Very few things in a computer *need* specialized drivers anymore. Video
cards are all I can think of off the top of my head.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                          (313) 227-2317

 "An apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away." - B. Kliban

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