I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.

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MBCook 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It did. That was one of its big features.

It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.

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conception 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.

	▲	jsolson 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.

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dylan604 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available