To: peter a. pedroli who wrote (349 ) 11/20/1999 8:53:00 PM From: peter a. pedroli Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 825
Subject: How high will Microsoft fly? to: John F. Dowd who wrote (34471) From: John F. Dowd Saturday, Nov 20 1999 10:33AM ET Reply # of 34529 To All: Read this and see how well served the users of Unix and all variants thereof have been to date. The peripheral driver interface has been terribly fragmented to the point where there is just now evolving a standard. MSFT has been a standard for some time now and has elevated that standard to plug and play while Unix is still trying to get their stuff together. By the INPH way (and other stocks like it)will be a big beneficiary of this new standard. (disclosure JFD owns 8M shares of INPH) Input and output devices on computers, such as storage or network adapters, are accessed and controlled by the operating system through device-specific software known as device drivers. Recently, these I/O devices have become more intelligent and sophisticated and, consequently, their drivers have evolved from simple routines into highly complex, multilayered programs. Because each operating system has its own unique I/O system and device interface, hardware vendors have been faced with the challenge of creating a different device driver for each operating system (including each variant of the UNIX* operating system) that they want their devices to support. Creating High-performance Drivers for All I/O Devices Two industry efforts are focused on standardizing platform and operating system I/O interfaces with the aim of increasing device driver portability, efficiency and performance while reducing the maintenance burden for device driver developers. Project UDI is developing the Uniform Driver Interface primarily focused on the UNIX operating system vendors, and the Intelligent I/O (I2O) Special Interest Group (SIG) is creating a specification for intelligent I/O solutions. JFD