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by cmrdporcupine 252 days ago
Exactly, and if you used machines 20-30 years ago you got used to all sorts of periodic terrible faults that could require rebooting the machine ("blue screens" or sad Mac, guru meditation, etc) or at least restarting the program.

On top of that many things were simply hard to use for non-specialists, even after the introduction of the GUI.

They were also riddled with security holes that mostly went unnoticed because there was simply a smaller and less aggressive audience.

Anyways most people's interaction with "software" these days is through their phones, and the experience is a highly focused and reduced set of interactions, and most "productive" things take a SaaS form.

I do think as a software developer things are in some ways worse. But I actually don't think it's on a technical basis but organizational. There are so many own goals against productivity in this industry now, frankly a result of management and team practices ... I haven't worked on a truly productive fully engaged team in years. 20-25 years ago I saw teams writing a lot more code and getting a lot more done, but I won't use this as my soapbox to get into why. But it's not technology (it's never been better to write code!) it's humans.

1 comments

> Exactly, and if you used machines 20-30 years ago

Bad news. We're older than we tend to remember.

Windows NT 3.1 shipped 32 years ago, the year after OS/2 2.0.

By 1994 NT 3.5 was out, and 30 years ago, NT 3.51 had been out for about 6 months.

I ran that and supported it in production and it was damned near bulletproof.