Chapter 1 -- Introduction

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Chapter 1

Souvenir shops in many of the cities I visit sell posters depicting the world from the local perspective. Landmarks and famous watering holes appear prominently in the foreground. The background features the rest of the planet in progressively less detail, confirming that the natives are less impressed by, say, the pyramids in Giza or the Great Wall of China than by some busy downtown street corner. From the same sort of insular perspective, a Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows 98 system consists of an operating system and a collection of device drivers for whatever hardware the end user chooses to populate the system with from one moment to the next. This book is all about the drivers and the nearby detail.