If you grew up in the PC scene during the 1980s or early 1990s, you know how painful it was to get hardware to work. And if you did not witness that (lucky you) here is how it went: every piece of hardware in your PC—say a sound card or a network card—had physical switches or jumpers in it. These switches configured the card’s I/O address space, interrupts, and DMA ports, and you had to be careful to select values that did not overlap with other cards. But that wasn’t all. Once you ha...
