| > Just false nostalgia memory. No, I don't think that's right, because: > 20 years ago things werent any better. I think you have the timeframe wrong. 20Y ago, no. 30Y ago, yes, somewhat. Win NT came out 32 years ago. 40Y ago, yes, very much. No public internet, very slow point-to-point dialup comms for a tiny %age of users, and tiny simple software for very limited hardware meant better quality software. I installed multiple Novell Netware servers on company networks, both Netware 2.15 and Netware 3.1. They never ever got updated, and ran flawlessly for years on end. I installed dozens, hundreds, of machines with DOS 3.3 and they ran it until they were scrapped. I put in multiuser systems based around SCO Xenix: Unix boxes, but with no networking, no GUI or X11, no comms, no compiler. They had uptimes in years: zero crashes. Stuff was more reliable because it had to be because shipping an updated meant posting media to thousands of users and sending a human to install it. Nobody could afford it. Software and hardware should be subject to the same laws as vehicles: if it fails in standard use, the maker is liable. So make it safe. If that means it has to be 0.1% of the size and 0.1% of the functionality that it was 20Y ago, fine: so be it. Because that's still huge and rich compared to the DOS stuff I started my career on. It is not some savage brutal unimaginable limitation, utterly unrealistic. It was the reality of end-20th century software around the time that the PC industry moved to 32-bit hardware at the end of the 1980s. |