[passwd]

It surely is different. We at least managed to contain some of the issues in normal operation. Back in the day, crashing whole OS in BSOD/panic style was more common, drivers unstable, things written in not-so-safe languages more popular.

So ultimately it depends what do you mean by reliable - by itself, functionality might not be so much better, but yes, sometimes you don't mind as much as you would do back then.