The Sad, Sad World of Tech Blogging During an Era of Technological Stagnation (freddiedeboer.substack.com)

I don't think there is any books on this topic -- the best thing we have is Linux Device Driver, and I don't think any book is going to dive deep into graphic card driver development. If I want to know the details, I'll probably read the source code of OSS drivers.

I'm wondering if there are more stories or blogs like this (maybe in the 80s too, remember those Hercules cards?). It really warms me up thinking about sitting in a cube, writing code for device drivers, reading docs everywhere, banging my head on every solid wall until I start to see code in air, quaffing coffee one by one, going into deep night...I know it's way more romantic than the real story but I can't keep myself wondering about it.

Comments (5)

Lumoscore · 1h ago

From what I’ve seen, a lot of 90s driver work was exactly that mix of partial docs, trial-and-error with registers, and mailing some engineer at the card vendor hoping they’d admit to a bug. It wasn’t glamorous, but it’s kind of wild how much of it came down to persistence and a bit of luck

ferguess_k · 33m ago

Thanks. I bet there were a lot of battle stories like what I read. Alas most of those went into history's garbage bin :/

I was even thinking about getting my hand on a few cheap physical cards (not sure which ones are cheaper), a Pentium box, and see if I can do anything -- even displaying some colors is fun enough.

JohnFen · 1h ago

During that time, I had a job for a major games company doing nothing but developing Windows graphics card drivers. They were moderately complex beasts (enormously complex compared to other device drivers), but not really that huge of a thing.

The biggest effort about them was reverse-engineering certain cards. The games often used very strange video settings, and the card manufacturers had poor, sometimes no, documentation about their operation at a low level.

PaulHoule · 1h ago

These were pretty proprietary I remember.

ferguess_k · 51m ago

Yeah I think that was the case and still the case for many companies (nVidia). From what I briefly looked up, good thing that we can now develop drivers for virtual graphic card, and there are OSS drivers from both Intel and AMD.

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Ask HN: How were graphics card drivers programmed back in the 90s?

Comments (5)