Comment Re:We B OS (Score 1) 226
Are they similar to the old Xenix and Unix drivers, 'cause those were fun.
Thank you for reminding me. I'll be twitching for the rest of the day. Funny how much outright crap one can remember -- I thought those neurons have long died off out of sheer disgust.
For the mercifully uninitiated, SCO Unix had a baroque system of little configuration files, object modules, a severely handicapped C compiler, and a similarly crippled linker for the purpose of modifyng kernel parameters and installing third-party drivers, both of which required re-linking the whole kernel (sysctl? dynamic data structures? run-time linkable modules? never heard. OK, it was the early '90s, but still.)
SCO, in their infinite wisdom, tried to make driver installation "user friendly": you would unpack the archive, start the installation script, and a few minutes later reboot to a freshly built kernel. Of course this failed to account for buggy scripts, weird configurations, and cargo-cult admins, any of which could make an unholy mess of the system and/or render it unbootable. I've had the dubious pleasure of cleaning up a number of such messes.