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Comment by manicennui | Hacker News Reader

I don't think software is anywhere near as buggy as it was in the past. Some of us had to support Windows machines in the late 90s and early 2000s.

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When the networking stack got worked out by Windows 98, everything was pretty smooth sailing. Until the drive-bys started. Then we moved to Windows NT and complexity, and albeit security, increased significantly. Windows XP was stable as fuck until the root kits started flowing. We moved through Vista, hopefully avoiding it all together until we landed at the fucking dream that was Windows 7. I would have stopped right there and been happy.

Then something got pushed over the cliff. Windows 10 and the UWP...like seriously WTF!? Satan's very own dumpster fire.

That may be true. But software is also much more ubiquitous and essential these days. At least in the 90s you could be confident your car wasn't buggy.

Yeah, and I shit you not, many vehicles have had software updates to solve oil consumption issues. People walk away from those service encounters just shaking their head wondering how in the fuck software was causing their car to lose/burn oil. Truth is, several different reasons.

The number of vehicle software updates are staggering.

American cars in the 90s were terrible. The domestic automakers wouldn't be in business today if people actually bought based on reliability. Now you can buy almost any brand and reasonably expect it to last over 100k miles.

Sure, but that had very little to do with software.

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