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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“Drivers” are translator programs for operating systems.
When the computer wants to send instructions of what to draw on the screen, the instructions come in the form the operating systems knows. A “driver” would then turn the instructions into detailed steps that the screen knows how to follow.
Imagine the computer wants to draw a red dot in the middle of the screen. It will say to the video driver “make the dot in the middle of the screen red.” The video driver will take that instruction and make calculations:
1. Take the width of the screen in dots (called pixels) and divide by two to find the middle.
2. Take the height of the screen in pixels and divide by two to find the middle.
3. Take these two numbers, and the send a signal to the screen to turn that pixel red.
Other drivers work in similar fashion. The operating system can say to the driver *what* it wants to happen. The driver can translate that for the specific hardware into exactly *how* that should be done.
Note: This is explanation is for illustration, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s how I’d explain it to a five year-old. 🙂
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