Those are some rose-colored glasses there. I remember the plug-n-play days and there was a reason that people nicknamed it plug-n-pray. It wasn't until PCI that plugging boards into PCs became sane.
It was far from perfect. But do you remember just how awful it was to go fishing for jumpers in your computer's tower case after they popped off? And you had to keep lots of spare jumpers around because some memory addresses and IRQs required more physical jumpers to specify than shipped with the card. Yes, yes, jumpers were cheap... But also hard to order and impossible to get hold of on short notice unless you had friends with spares.
I occasionally rearranged which IRQs/memory cards used specifically to use fewer jumpers so that I would have enough.
PnP wasn't technically amazing. Yes, PCI was much better. Jumpers sucked.
Those are some rose-colored glasses there. I remember the plug-n-play days and there was a reason that people nicknamed it plug-n-pray. It wasn't until PCI that plugging boards into PCs became sane.