Re: Grove: Plug and Play has fallen short of expectations
Robert Harley (Robert.Harley@inria.fr)
Wed, 28 Aug 1996 19:16:48 +0200
>>Grove, [...] blamed the breakneck pace of software enhancement for the
>>disappointing reality of Plug and Play.
>[...]
>on the amiga, circa mid-to-late eighties, we were doing
>plug-and-play devices [...]
>you turn off your machine, open it up, push a card in any slot, close
>it up and turn it on, then use the installer disk that came with it
>that usually dropped a single .device file in your /devices
Yeah to that!
On Acorn machines since 1987, cards have their drivers in ROM on the
card. On power-up, they are transferred to the host machine. In fact
the word "driver" doesn't even enter the Acorn-user's vocabulary.
Same with "installing" applications. On an Acorn machine, it
involves dragging a directory from the floppy or CDROM to the HD.
Topic for discussion:
Why does the world's most shite technology have the largest market share?
Why does the free market not work *at* *all* in this case?