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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget how bad software was back in the '90s. Third-party software on Windows 95 was horrible--crashes due to drivers and such were a constant source of headaches that we just don't deal with to anywhere near the same frequency anymore. You could WinNuke anyone connected to an IRC server. A Web page could blue screen you by embedding c:\con\con in an image. "Microsoft Word crashed" was just a constant thing people had to live with; there was no good way for Microsoft to know about the crashes before telemetry. "Starting Java..." would regularly kill your browser. Over on the Linux side, forgetting to run LILO after recompiling a kernel would render your system unbootable. XFree86 was a nightmare to configure. Etc.

Modern software is in fact more reliable than older software.

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> It's easy to forget how bad software was back in the '90s

> Modern software is in fact more reliable than older software.

Putting this as "90s vs now" is borderline strawman IMO.

I genuinely believe the peak in terms of performance and polish was somewhere in the early-mid 2000s; developers of the time had experienced the 90s and true shortage of CPU time and other resources. The mindset was still alive, even if PCs had gotten very powerful by 2005.

Mid-to-late 2000s mark the start of mass webification and mobilification of software. "Mobile eats the world" and "nobody wants to install software." In my experience it's been downhill from there; software started being developed with a completely different mindset and completely different approach.

During the early phase of this transition, your bottleneck was invariably network I/O; so developers didn't really need to give a crap about CPU cycles or RAM. Lack of UI polish could be blamed on the web being what it is, a document platform coerced into becoming an application delivery platform. Most of the early "app web" applications were truly horrific compared to "native" software, but no matter, the web was considered more accessible and a better platform for developers. And users didn't have to INSTALL SOFTWARE! Woohoo.

Of course the constraints are not the same today, but the original mindset that held until early 2000s is long gone. For example, instead of trying to stick to your platform's long established UI conventions as you would if developing Windows software in 2000, designers nowadays are more concerned about branding and making up their own experience; every "web app" looks and feels and behaves different.

Now as for reliability, I can't say whether the mid 2000s were worse or better than today. 90s software definitely had a lot of issues, but I had no trouble running Windows XP SP2 with months of uptime. The nature of software failures has changed, and today you have less crashes (though they're still there), but on the other hand, I regularly see applications being confused about their state, being stuck trying to do something that evidently doesn't succeed, infinite spinners, "whoops, something went wronk", "we can't serve your request at this time" and "please reload and log in again." If we consider all these to be failures, then I think software in general isn't any more reliable than it used to be. Updates are another interesting phenomenon; back in the day, I wasn't forced to update. I never lost work or had to reboot and restart everything because of updates.

I just want to point out that you're saying windows ME was the peak of software performance and polish.

And following that - I call complete and utter bollocks.

The GP actually praised Windows XP SP2, not Windows Me. Now one could argue that in some ways, Windows XP was a regression and Windows 2000 was the peak. But not Windows Me; that's widely regarded as the worst of the doomed 9x line.

Sure - and apparently we're all happy to claim that "today is the worst - yesteryear was fantastic!"

And then ignore all the stinking piles of garbage that actually made up the past.

This is nostalgia in action. Those rose-tinted goggles have slipped down over your eyes. You remember "Windows 2000 was great", you don't remember "Windows ME was so bad it was literally (not metaphorically literally - literally literally) unusable, and Microsoft STILL SHIPPED IT!".

> Those rose-tinted goggles have slipped down over your eyes.

I never actually said I agreed with the nostalgia; I was just clarifying the position of the person you were replying to, and what I perceive to be widely held opinions.

> Windows ME was so bad it was literally (not metaphorically literally - literally literally) unusable

Perhaps it was that bad for some people. If so, that's unfortunate. But I ended up with Windows Me sometime in college, and it was usable enough that I used it to develop and ship the first few versions of the first commercial software product that I was hired to develop. So it wasn't that bad. Still, once I could afford a PC with Windows XP, I got one and never looked back.

Windows ME was strange. In some computers it was a modernized Win98, not really better or worse. On others, it caused all kinds of crashes, including total irrecoverable data loss on hard disks.

One of the weirdest examples I know of was a particular series of desktops, sold in the supermarket with ME. I knew 2 people buying identical machines in the same week from the same supermarket. One of them worked flawlessly. The other one was such a miserable crash prone machine. We forced Win98 on the crasher and all was well again.

Right, I don't really know anyone who seriously used ME. I guess some people who bought prebuilt computers at an unfortunate time might have been stuck with it for some time. The people I know held on to 98 (or 98SE) for as long as it served them, and then switched to 2000 or XP. I also never saw ME in schools, libraries, corporate settings, etc.

Did I really say that? From any given era, you can find gems and garbage.

You could almost even say that the past is just like today! :D

It turns out it's not all roses and bliss. It's basically the same half-baked, mostly unusable, bucket of dirt you dig through to find the diamonds.

But everyone only ever remembers the diamonds.

No-one said it's all roses and bliss. My argument is that mainstream software was, on average, more performant and more polished (and not considerably more buggy or unstable; possibly less buggy due to being less complex) than it is today. I was relatively happy using mostly the same software that everyone else was using too. Today, not so much; I find most mainstream software unbearable, repulsive, slow, full of annoying quirks & rough edges. I'm not happy using it so I don't. For me it's a completely different era.

I don't know if anyone is measuring this objectively, and I assume not. So we might not ever be able to say whether the claim is objectively true or just my subjective experience. But it's not fair to dismiss the whole argument by mischaracterizing it.

My recollection of software from the Windows 95 era is different. The reliability of desktop apps varied depending on the type of software but problems were often related to hardware. Today, hardware is much more reliable and adheres to widely adopted standards.

Faster, more capable hardware hasn't necessarily made modern software better. In many cases the opposite: apps are slow and gobble up computer resources with no restraints.

>Faster, more capable hardware hasn't necessarily made modern software better. In many cases the opposite: apps are slow and gobble up computer resources with no restraints.

Not exactly a new phenomenon: applications always grow to exploit new features offered to them

Yes, that's very true. But in the 90s, both developers and users would not tolerate slow or memory-hungry apps. The hardware and memory constraints meant developers chose languages and tools for that purpose.

Today, developers choose languages and tools that suit their comfort first. The user's comfort often takes secondary consideration.

We have very different memories of the 90s. I remember it being full of slow, memory hungry and buggy apps.

Your memory of the 90s isn't mine - memory-hungry apps have been a thing for over 50 years, my friend

I switched to Linux because of Windows 95. And getting Linux up and running back then was a real pain. But once it was running, it was way better than those bluescreens of death.

So in my memory it was not the hardware.

Win95 was a mess. However the Win2k I had, as I recall, was stable, solid and performant, esp. considering that it was running on much less than the weakest Raspberry Pi (IIRC I had a 450Mhz Pentium3 machine with 128 MB of RAM and a 5400 rpm HDD).

Win2k was really great. Super-stable and efficient. But we have to ignore the wide open security holes before the first few service packs.

Yep, constantly restarting PCs, having to kill random rogue processes in Task Manager (even explorer for some reason), having the alert come up in internet explorer that a script was taking too long, the list goes on and on.

There have been a lot of improvements in the meantime that have led to better software, amongst others: version control, automated tests, automated deployments and more useful programming languages.

> Over on the Linux side, forgetting to run LILO after recompiling a kernel would render your system unbootable. XFree86 was a nightmare to configure

I'm not sure those are reliability issues.

I wanted free photo editing back in the day so I could learn to be a graphic artist. Six months of messing with Xfree86 and I got a career in programming and sysadmin

I totally disagree with that. However, I was a Mac user during the 90s. In my experience, software was very reliable then. Of course, you had to be careful with extensions and other software that could crash the whole system, but once you got a stable system it remained fast and stable. Weird things only happened after Apple transitioned to OS X -- the first versions of OS X with their spinning beach ball of death really were awful.

The Mac didn't even have memory protection before OSX iirc? I seem to recall that people would have to restart their Mac if something crashed, since it wouldn't be just the application that would crash - it would be the entire OS.

restart their Mac if something crashed

Perhaps the lack of memory protection and the catastrophic consequences of an app crashing made Mac developers more careful and aware of the importance of stable software.

I think you might have a bit too much nostalgia (or maybe we just had very different experiences), but I remember Mac OS 8/8.6 crashing a lot, with the dreaded bomb icon.

Everyone I knew with an iMac had a toothpick or paper clip in the top handle, due to how common they needed to press the reset hole.

At the time my father used to edit a local news paper in PageMaker and it was particularly bad.

I don't know why people are downvoting you.

I went to a middle school that was "mac only" in the 90s. They were complete and utter crap.

They crashed constantly. The spinning pizza of death made a near hourly appearance.

We had two machines issued to each classroom, and most times the kids wouldn't even turn them on they were so bad.

>Everyone I knew with an iMac had a toothpick or paper clip in the top handle, due to how common they needed to press the reset hole.

What kind of Mac were you running?

The straightened paperclip was only there to eject recalcitrant floppy disks (early on), and then recalcitrant CDs later

Restarting the machine was always a menu option or physical button

He said iMac - the G3 iMacs had reset/interrupt holes (see to the right of the Ethernet jack) https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/B...

there are a LOT of iMac models

Never heard of someone needing to reset any of them with a paperclip before

Reset holes for paper clips? I can't remember any of my Macs having a reset hole like you describe. In any case, I never had to use one. There was a key combo for resetting the OS.

As someone doing web development in 2001-2003 and still testing stuff on OS 9... No. It crashed all the time in the office. Several different machines and all I did was open a few web pages and sometimes write down some notes.

Thats why we got AutoRecovery as a feature! /s

Nearly spit out my coffee at this XD

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