It was the dawn of computers and software. Operating systems were being developed, and there were still no agreed-upon abstractions. Then came a simple abstraction: the device driver. The device driver enabled the development of software that was not locked to a specific hardware; it allowed developers to write code that worked with any hardware. This seemingly simple change made software development a lot simpler. It is something we take for granted today, but that we forget when we develop software. Why do we keep on forgetting this simple idea? In this article, I’ll explain what the driver abstraction is, how it came to be, and the problems it tried to solve. I will also show why we keep forgetting about it, and the costs we pay every day for not learning from our past.