My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment.
PCI was awesome and a huge improvement in everyway. What MCA tried and failed to be.
I don't dispute that fact one iota, but it dosen't mean that ISA can't do plug and play either or my ISA SoundBlaster AWE64
Gold and a large number of the later ISA NICs wouldn't exist.
Memory handling was primarily done by drivers
Plug and Play? Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself.
Source?
For the memory handling I quote a
MS Knowledgebase articleThis article contains an overview of how expanded memory that conforms to the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) and extended memory that conforms to the Extended Memory Specification (XMS) is created and managed in MS- DOS versions 5.0 and later by the device drivers HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE.
Before you say 'they are a part of DOS' then think again as there have been for a long time a number of third party DOS memory managers.
For the plug and play issue I quote a section of the USBINTRO.DOC found in the DOS USB driver package on
Bret Johnson's Home Page.
These DOS USB Drivers are "Plug-and-Play". It doesn't matter if the software is installed before the hardware, or vice-versa. For instance, you can leave a USB joystick plugged in all the time, and just load the joystick driver immediately before you load the game that uses the joystick, and unload the drivers as soon as the game is done. Or, you can load the disk drive software through your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, leave it running all the time, and just plug and unplug your flash drives when you want to use them (just like you do with floppy drives). The program architecture allows the correct hardware and software to "find" each other, no matter which one gets installed first.
Ultimately a lot of people dismiss DOS because they expect DOS to do a lot of things 'out of the box' that a more featured OS is capable of doing. But step back for just a moment, what is DOS? It is a
Disk Operating System. Not a memory operating system, not a peripheral operating system (to any meaningful extent) or suchlike. All DOS has to do is perform disk operations and load executables into memory and execute them. The app then does the rest with the help of drivers to access needed peripherals and calls DOS for any disk accesses, unless it does it itself by banging the metal.