Agreed.

Or debuggers that would take out the entire OS.

Or a bad driver crashing everything multiple times a week.

Or a misbehaving process not handing control back to the OS.

I grew up in the era of 8 and 16 bit micros and early PCs, they where hilariously less stable than modern machines while doing far less, there wasn’t some halcyon age of near perfect software, it’s always been a case of things been good enough to be good enough but at least operating systems did improve.

Remember BSODs? Used to be a regular occurrence, now they're so infrequent they're gone from windows 11

And the "cooperative multitasking" in old operating systems where one program locking up meant the whole system was locked up

Mostly because Microsoft shut down kernel access, wrote it's own generic drivers for "simple" devices (USBs, printers, sound cards, ...) and made "heavy" drivers submit to their WHQL quality control to be signed to run.

Gone? I had two last year, lets not overstate things.

Daily+ occurrences to two in a year pretty much rounds to zero. Kind of like we said measles were eradicated because there was <X per year cases.

My anecdata is that my current PC is four years old, with the same OS install, and I can't even recall if I've seen one BSoD.

I guess that is because you run it on old hardware. When I've bought my Asus ROG expensive laptop I had bsod almost daily. A year later with all updates I had bsod once in a month on the same device and windows installation.

If you have faulty hardware no amount of software is going to solve your problems (other than software that just completely deactivates said faulty hardware).

The fact you continued to have BSOD issues after a full reinstall is pretty strong evidence you probably had some kind of hardware failure.

But there was no reinstall in my case. Years goes by and further in time there are less and less bsod.

My point is if you are using the same "old" modern hardware, bsod is very rare.

Ah, sorry, I misread your comment. Glad you're getting a better experience with your device over time!

Still get them fairly regularly except now they come with a QR code.

Depends, if you install games with anti-cheat they can often conflict and cause BSODs.

It's why I don't play the new trackmania.

They're definitely not gone.

I remember Linux being remarkable reliable throughout its entire life in spite of being rabidly worked on.

Windows is only stabilizing because it's basically dead. All the activity is in the higher layers, where they are racking their brains on how to enshittify the experience, and extract value out of the remaining users.

As a Windows driver developer: LOL

I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent.

There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.

More generally, as you hint to, desktop operating systems were crap, but the software on top of it was much more comprehensively debugged. This was presumably a combination of two factors: you couldn't ship patches, so you had a strong incentive to debug it if you wanted to sell it, and software had way fewer features.

Come to think about it, early browsers kept crashing and taking down the entire OS, so maybe I'm looking at it with rosy glasses.

You are looking back with rosy glasses indeed.

Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reboot.

Oh and at least in the '90s you could already ship patches, we used to get them with the floppies and later CDs provided by magazines.

FWIW, I was speaking of the 80s.

It truly depends on the quality of the software you were using at the time. Maybe the software you used didn't result in many issues. I know a lot of the games I played as a kid on my family's or friend's Win95 machines resulted in system lockups or blue screens practically every time we used them.

As I mess around with these old machines for fun in my free time, I encounter these kinds of crashes pretty dang often. Its hard to tell if its just the old hardware is broken in odd ways or not so I can't fully say its the old software, but things are definitely pretty unreliable on old desktop Windows running old desktop Windows apps.

As an OS/2 and Linux users, I mostly missed out on Win95 fun.

But I was thinking of the (not particularly) golden days of MS-DOS/DR-DOS/Amiga/Atari applications.

Or just http without the s. We take it for granted now, but not even that long ago http was the standard.

But at the time that software was "new" and unreliable.

ah yes, one person understands the point I was trying to make (:

You know, I had spent a good amount of years not having even a single thought about rational rose, and now that’s all over.

I do apologize. I couldn't bear this burden alone.

It could definitely be worse. I have the privilege of using it weekly :(

What? How? I thought we stamped it out in the Purge of 2007.

Some things are forged in hell and refuse to die.

Ah, yes, the Oracle product model.

How much of that do you think would be attributable to IBM or Rational Software?

I know very little about Rational Rose, other than it always sounded like the stage name of a Vulcan stripper.

I think old in this sense is "released" rather than "beta" - it takes time to make any software reliable. Many of the examples here further prove that young software is unreliable.

Remember when debuggers were young?

Remember when OSes were young?

Remember when multi-tasking CPUs were young?

Etc...

Yes this is what I was trying to say. Code that's been in production for 20 years has less bugs than code that's been around for 20 minutes

At least that project was wise enough to use Lisp for storing its project files.

You misunderstand. They are explicitly referring to the survivors that have been iterated on and chosen for being good.

They're NOT saying all software in the past was better.

correct.

Rational Rhapsody called and wants the crown back