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)
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Let’s say your computer wants to find a file. If you have an old HDD with magnetic platters, that involves moving the reading arm to the right platter, rotating it the right angle, and extending to the right distance from the center. If it’s a CD, you just need angle and distance. If it’s flash or SSD, it’s another process entirely.
Point is, the specific, mechanical instructions needed to find the file are going to be different for different kinds of hardware.
But your computer doesn’t have time for that. It just wants to “find file x” and then find the file.
That’s where the driver comes in. The driver takes common, well known instructions (such as “find file x”) and converts those into the hardware specific instructions necessary to carry out that task. This way, the hardware can carry out the instructions the way it wants, without regard for the operating system, and the operating system can worry about tasks in a more abstract sense without worrying about the specific hardware architecture.
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