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Unfortunately, I haven't really existed for long enough to know how computers functioned before PnP and the PCI stuff existed. According to various googles, hardware had to be manually physically "configured" with jumpers and switches and plugboards.

What does this even mean? What had to be "configured". I can barely imagine anything you would have to configure with a keyboard or mouse, although they had their own ports. Maybe like a hardware toaster: you would have to take a bunch of wires and connect them to the begin toasting/eject food parts of a toaster, and connect those to a computer. Then, would you do something like moving jumpers to redirect some bit into the eject wire, so you could write to that bit and have bread pop out?

Can someone who experienced that stuff give me an example of a full session of manually installing a device, like a 4-button mouse with a light that glows when the mouse is connected?

user1319644
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This question is really wide, so I'm voting to close it even though I'll take a quick trip down memory lane with you.

Things like keyboards did not need configuration, they just plugged in. Things like hard drives required jumpers to tell whether they were the primary or slave hard drive. [ The jumpers were on the drive ]. Things like serial ports would often have dip switches to set the serial port and IRQ - think of something which looks like an IC with a number of tiny white switches on it.

Mice did not really exist - to the extent they did, they just plugged into the serial port - of-course the serial port needed to be configured as above.

The software side of things is as important as the hardware. Things which used the serial port - eg modem and mouse could typically be configured on 1 of 4 ports. The software also needed to be told which port the device was on.

davidgo
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