Multiple boot floppies? Never had to do that. I was very excited by the new version of DR-DOS that let you build a menu system in CONFIG.SYS to load a different set of drivers and memory managmemt at start up.
Also the wierd IRQ issues. Simpler when you had to set them with header pins on the card in question. When early plug and play came in it was awful, automatic IRQ conflicts and sometimes no way to change them. Was a real pain when the knock off sound blaster clone I had would auto assign itself anything other than IRQ 5 and some games would stop making sounds!
As far as I recall that was not a hardware problem. ISA PnP cards describe what they can do and then the driver picks one of the possibilities and programs the card.
It got fun when real sound blasters had broken config, so a generic driver (for a unix system) would fail.
In my experience (playing with unix) IRQ conflicts was much more a dos/windows problem than hardware. Though the hardware was nasty too.
I had problems with that all the way into Windows 98. I had a motherboard that would not stop sharing IRQs between a WinTV PCI card and the onboard audio. Attempting to use the TV capture card would crash the system, and there was literally no way to stop the motherboard from doing it.
XP, and the hardware of that new era, for all its faults was a HUGE step forward on UPnP.
Yeah, that irked me too when I read the article. I had only one boot disk, with a very stuffy CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT that was running like 12 different configurations for what I wanted to run. Sure, I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart but the diskette never left the A: drive. Actually I still have that diskette virtualized inside of one of my DosBox VM's.
The Dos & Windows Configuration Manager... if I remember correctly bridged the gap between DOS and Plug ‘n’ Play (or Pray) functionality.
If one were not touched by good fortune whilst specifying, assembling, and configuring one’s system, then one might reasonably expect interact much too often with this obscure system component.
Here’s the thing though. In that transitory phase between DOS and Windows one often has to “drop to DOS” to run some software, and even assemble “Boot Disks” to provide a customised stripped down environment, especially for games.
The joy in this particular piece of software was that not only was it obscure and poorly documented but that even once you figured out it was required it still broke some games that required access “all” of the lower 640k which often left you with a choice between not having sound and not playing the game at all ...
Also the wierd IRQ issues. Simpler when you had to set them with header pins on the card in question. When early plug and play came in it was awful, automatic IRQ conflicts and sometimes no way to change them. Was a real pain when the knock off sound blaster clone I had would auto assign itself anything other than IRQ 5 and some games would stop making sounds!