After painstakingly installing printer drivers for a thermal printer at work I realized I still don’t truly understand what I was installing. (Bonus points if you can cover video card drivers too cause idk what drivers are In that sense either)
In: 2515
It’s hilarious to me that once again we have an ELI5 thread asking about some computer terminology, and everyone is coming up with all sorts of analogies EXCEPT the analogy built into the name itself!
It’s called a “driver”, people. That means it metaphorically “drives” a specific piece of hardware, like someone drives a car, or a train, or cattle.
The point of a driver, both literal and metaphorical, is to handle the low-level details of a request without their boss having to know or care about them. Tell a taxi driver to take you to Carnegie Hall, and he’ll do it, without you having to give him moment-by-moment directions on when to push the pedals and turn the wheel.
In the ancient days before drivers, things like word processors would have to “drive” the printer themselves, essentially pushing the pedals and turning the wheel. This worked fine if, for example, the user only had a stick-shift printer. But if someone had an automatic transmission printer, suddenly the code was trying to push a pedal that didn’t even exist and at best you’d get corrupted gibberish.
With drivers, the word processor doesn’t need to know exactly what kind of printer you have. If you have a stick-shift printer, you install the stick-shift driver. If you have an automatic transmission, you install the automatic transmission driver. Then you just tell the driver what you want, and they take care of making it happen. The driver allows low-level operational details to be abstracted into high-level commands.
Latest Answers