One very complicated part of bringing up Plug and Play was bootstrapping the entire process. After all, the number of computers that supported the Plug and Play specification started at zero, because the specification was still being written. A lot of clever tricks were used to retrofit Plug and Play onto legacy hardware.¹ The Windows 95 team worked to gather a very large range of PC brands and models, and as part of doing “Plug and Play for PCs that predate the Plug and Play specification”, the...