The Plug and Play Architecture: A Brief History
It is apparent that the revolution of the PC within the industry occurred because everyone could afford and use computers. Yet more than a decade went by during which naive users were expected to understand the hardware details of each device inserted into their systems. Knowledge of I/O port, interrupt level, and DMA channel usage of every existing device within a system was prerequisite when installing a new device.
Further, the design of operating systems assumed a very static hardware configuration. The installation or removal of a device required, at a minimum, a full reboot of the OS.
With the advent of Windows 95 (and some hardware prerequisites), a concerted effort to automate the configuration ...
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