What's the difference between a full NIC driver and a miniport driver?

The older full NIC driver contained a lot of code that is common between drivers for different network cards. The developer would have to include the same code in any full NIC driver. With a miniport driver, much of the common code has been moved to the NDIS library so that the driver is smaller and easier to write. Windows 95 supports the use of a miniport network driver that is binary compatible with the Windows NT miniport driver.