way OT: IITRAN and SPANTRAN

[Chuck Guzis]

On 1/30/2006 at 11:33 PM Don North wrote:

>Who would write Windows device drivers of their own free will anyway :-)

Actually, once you get the hang of it, it's not too bad--and probably no
worse than writing *nix drivers.  Probably the toughest parts are the power
management and plug-n-pray routines.  Some things, like floppy drivers, are
actually a driver-within-a-driver; i.e., an outer task that dispatches
requests to an inner thread for processing.  Microsoft has done a pretty
decent job of abstracting a lot of the more common hardware components.

Yeah, I know--heresy.  But the best part of NT/2K/XP is the kernel.  It's
all that other stuff that I don't like.  IMOHO, the earlier (NT 3.5 and 4)
kernels were probably the best (when M$ still had to think about non x86
architectures).

Cheers,
Chuck