When people go on about MS being a monopoly and not doing anything for the common plebs, I always mention DX.

DX is the bollocks! And it took MS to implement it, it was going nowhere with the company that invented it...

You can write something in DX and be pretty damn confident it's going to work on most machines regardless of their hardware.

Remember back with the old Dos games where you had to choose your sound cards when the game was installing? And set the IRQ's etc. That's not very nice for the average user to have to do.

And DX means the programmer doesn't have to care what sound card the user has as DX handles all the compatability issues...