(idea) by everyone Tue Jan 02 2001 at 5:00:05
These indicate which driver is used (major), and which part of the hardware it represents (minor)

In Linux 2.4, devfs makes these completely transparent to the user. No more mknod. Entries in /dev are created automagically as modules are loaded and hardware is detected.

So soon, device numbers will be a thing of the past in the Linux world.
I like it!