From: syseng@gfsys.co.uk   
      
   On 10/1/25 20:56, David Goodwin wrote:   
   > In article , bill.gunshannon@gmail.com   
   > says...   
   >>   
   >> On 10/1/2025 12:52 AM, David Goodwin wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>>   
   >>> In the 90s Windows NT was only released for IBM PC compatibles, and   
   >>> platforms which conformed (to varying degrees) to the ARC standard.   
   >>> Later from the 2000 after ARC ceased to be relevant, EFI was adopted as   
   >>> a new standard.   
   >>>   
   >>   
   >> I seem to remember NT coming with a list of supported hardware   
   >> and if you had otherwise MS did not guarantee it would run at   
   >> all, much less perform acceptably.   
   >   
   > Yeah, the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) told you machines (or other   
   > hardware) Windows NT was *known* to be compatible with - it had been   
   > tested and should work fine. Anything not on the list came down to   
   > whether the vendor had written drivers for it since the version of   
   > Windows NT you're running came out. It took a while for some vendors to   
   > start building NT drivers, and not all bothered until it started to   
   > become more widespread with Windows 2000 and XP.   
      
   You could argue that the hcl has now been subsumed into the driver and   
   kernel layers. That only made possible by a strictly layered OS design.   
      
   In the old days, hardware compatibility lists were common, but the real   
   achievement of open source, Linux FreeBSD etc, is that you can now plug   
   in any old card and the OS will find and fully support it. That sort   
   of thing has had decades of support and development, but makes life much   
   easier.   
      
   Chris   
      
   >   
   > For RISC machines, the HCL mattered more. Rather than aiming to   
   > standardise hardware under the ARC standard as PC vendors did under the   
   > "IBM PC compatible" de facto standard, a lot of RISC vendors just relied   
   > on using Windows NT's Hardware Abstraction Layer to paper over any   
   > deviations from the ARC standard or prior machines they may have   
   > produced. Each new machine got a new HAL module, and without one of   
   > those Windows NT probably wouldn't even boot.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)