If Intel had kept the old numbering system

[joeguru]

When I first started working on computers the 8086 and 286 were very common. Remember messing with serial ports, parallel ports and IRQ settings? Oh those stinking switches and jumper settings were terrible. WordPerfect was the original blue screen program.

[Doobie]

Originally Posted by joeguru

When I first started working on computers the 8086 and 286 were very common. Remember messing with serial ports, parallel ports and IRQ settings? Oh those stinking switches and jumper settings were terrible. WordPerfect was the original blue screen program.

Oh yes, things were plug-and-play back then. No need for a printer driver, the printer just output ascii to the port. No need for a soundcard driver, everything was adlib or soundblaster compatible. Graphics were CGA or VGA compatible.

Once Windows was introduced, it took nearly 20 years to get back to plug-and-play ( I don't mean what MS called plug-and-play a few years ago, where you still needed to manually install a driver). Once Windows was introduced, it also took nearly 20 years to get back to monotasking (thinks to Windows 8).