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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probably not the actual reason why it is called a driver, but i like to think that it is:
a driver is like an “operating manual” that the operating system uses in order to know how to communicate with a piece of hardware in order to operate, or **drive,** it.
You, as the user, tells the computer what to do, then it talks to the driver and tell it what is supposed to be happening, then the driver translates that into something that the piece of hardware will understand and know what to do with.
the driver is… the driver.
The printer is the vehicle that you cannot operate. The computer or OS is the road.
Only the driver knows how to drive the vehicle (printer).
You, the user, just tell the driver what to do or where to go.
Here’s the best “ELI5” that I can do.
A driver is nothing but a program that tells the hardware (like a video card) what to do.
imagine the computer is a car, you are you
then the driver is the thing you get in driving school
They are instructions manual for your operating system (Windows, Linux, etc.) on how to use the device.
Drivers are software that tell your operating system (Windows, Mac OS, etc) how to make a piece of hardware (E.g. printer, graphics card, etc) work.
It will translate instructions from your operating system into the right language for the piece of hardware in question to understand and operate on.
I worked at Walmart when I was young. I was pretty familiar with computer things, but completely unfamiliar with anything sports related – especially golf. One day a man comes in looking for “Golf Drivers”. I was extremely confused.
In order for a device that’s plugged into a computer to do anything, the computer (and therefore operating system) needs to be able to send and receive instructions to/from the device. With the sheer amount of devices out there it would be an impossible task for an operating system to support every single instruction for every single device, therefore the work is split up.
The operating system developers publish that their OS will call instructions ABC, and look for instructions XYZ. It is then up to the device manufacturers to write some kind of software that sends/receives these instructions and translates them into instructions that the device can understand and vice versa. Instead of each OS developer trying to program for 1000 printers and 3000 wireless keyboards (and still missing some), each device manufacturer simply develops 3 drivers (one for each major OS) and it becomes much easier to handle. This also frees up device manufacturers to add extra features and settings that the user can configure as well.
When it comes to video card drivers it’s no different. The graphics card will have instructions that make it run and those instructions frequently change with each new card, yet the OS needs to still be able to communicate with them. The drivers include the new instructions, as well as optimizations to how the existing instructions are translated.
If you only speak english and a coworker only spoke german, you would need a translator to communicate. Drivers are like translators for your computer and your printer to be able to speak.
Your operating system and programs know what they want done. Your printer or video/sound card have functions they can do. The drivers are the translation or cord connecting the two.
Your OS will usually try to make sure it has all the right drivers, by squinting at what’s plugged into it and comparing it to types of devices it knows about. If it guesses wrong, or can’t figure out what the device is (because it’s too new, or old, or from a small manufacturer, etc),that’s when you get called in to install different drivers.
Think of trying to get around, somewhere you don’t speak the language, back before the internet. The drivers are the little phrasebook you carry around. Having the right one for the right language that covers the tasks you want to do is the best case – but maybe you might be able to scrape by sometimes with a lower quality book that only has very simple/basic phrases, or one in the wrong language, as long as you luck out and someone happens to understand, or you manage to cludge together the phrase you need out of what fragments you have.
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