points by gf000 2 days ago | 0 comments
Bit didn't it also feel bad back then, you just forgot about it and has a rose-tinted view of the past?
Like software used to crash, were single-threaded and constantly frozen. How many times did you have to issue Ctrl+alt+del vs today? Even UIs were constantly out of sync with the underlying data, I would even go as far to claim that reactive frameworks like react cut down a big category of software bugs.
[–] worble 2 days ago
[–] sloob 2 days ago
I agree. Though some software pain used to be more intense (blue screen of death, etc), our lives have become more deeply enmeshed into software, so we feel the friction more. I think we also expect a lot more from software in our daily lives than we did 20 years ago.
[–] gf000 2 days ago
Well, banking is digitalized for a long time (such a long time that they actually are using mainframes and cobol), and it's definitely not the epitome of good software, so I think it was always important, maybe we were just less directly reliant on it.
[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago
Feel worse? No. Was it clunkier to navigate and figure out the workflow? Perhaps. But I rarely remember saying "this application feels slow" in the late 00's/early 2010's, on much worse hardware.
Websites are the obvious example here. Much slower speeds but pages loaded at acceptable paces. Now I'm on gigabit internet and webpages likely take longer to load. And we all know what it's loading in the background are not things that make the UX better.
[–] Insanity 2 days ago
This definitely plays a role, and depending on your use-case the “stability” of your software and system varies greatly. E.g Messing around with mods could leave your game in an unplayable state (to the point it just wouldn’t launch properly), whilst today you just download/install them from Steam workshop with 1-click.
Now when something crashes I actually need it for work, or to bank, or to navigate, or hell sometimes the only menu at a restaurant is a QR code but my damn phone is failing to recognise it again.
When you introduce technology into every facet of life, it's suddenly death by a thousand cuts when things don't work, or are a slow buggy mess.