Hacker News

points by ravenstine 2 days ago | 0 comments

The argument in this article is specious. How does the fragility of CDs, disk fragmentation, cybersecurity being a relatively young and niche field, a lack of anti-cheat, the turbo button, and a lack of auto-save have anything to do with software being "horrible?" I'd say it doesn't. These are mostly gripes about the digital environment being in its infancy. I don't consider almost any of these things to be a sign of horrible software other than BSODs being way more common than they are today.

Software is bad when it's buggy, slow, bloated, annoying, distracting, anti-user, anti-consumer, anti-ownership, and rent-seeking. I pine for the days where something as simple as "wtf can't it autosave" be a reason to call software horrible.

[–] bhelkey 2 days ago

You skipped mentioning the first problem listed: that computers used to crash all the time.

Software in general used to be much less stable. For example, browsers didn't always have tab isolation. A single bad site could, and frequently would, crash the whole browser.

[–] M95D 2 days ago

It's because those things that improved stability were just being invented.

No browser had tab isolation. In fact, no browser had tabs.

Memory protection in Win311 (first to use the new v86 mode) and Win9x was intentionally weak to allow DOS programs to access hardware directly. WinNT/2000 broke sound in all DOS games and lots of other programs that relied on direct hardware access. The price of stability was incompatibility.

I ran Win98 until 2006 or so. Once I replaced all bad software and drivers, it was stable enough to not bother to turn off at night and do suspend-to-ram instead. I recently bought an Acer Swift Edge w/ Win11. It is so bad, it is not capable of S3 sleep. It won't even disconnect from wifi.

[–] bhelkey 2 days ago

> No browser had tab isolation. In fact, no browser had tabs.

The article mentions Windows XP which certainly had IE with tabs but the problem predates that.

Earlier versions of Windows (95, 98, 2000) featured a single window per site. So if one wanted 3 "tabs" one would need three separate windows. But the browser windows were not isolated. An issue in one window would impact ALL of the web browser's windows.

In addition, there was some issue with IE in particular. A crash in IE would sometimes make the taskbar and desktop disappear then restart.

More generally, browsers did not have isolation. This made for a much worse user experience.

[–] M95D 2 days ago

Internet Exporer 6 did not have tabs.

There was a setting to open each window in a separate process. Even Windows Explorer (the file manager) had this setting, in case it crashed extracting a thumbnail or something.

IE crash would take down Windows Explorer because it was integrated into it since Win98. A bad ideea, IMO - the point where bloat began.

Like I said, technologies were just being invented. Back then things improved (mostly - see IE integration as a counter-example). Each new version was better than the one before. Can you say that now?

[–] bhelkey 2 days ago

> Internet Explorer 6 did not have tabs.

Turns out tabs were added in IE 7 [1] about 2/3rds of the way through Windows XP's lifecycle.

> Like I said, technologies were just being invented... Each new version was better than the one before. Can you say that now?

That is largely what the article is saying. Software is getting worse BUT software improved by leaps and bounds for quite a while. These improvements compounded over time meaning that new software (while regressing) is still much better than software from the 1990s and 2000s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_7

[–] ChickeNES 2 days ago

Opera had tabs and sessions in 2000. I started using it specifically because IE6 would crash and lose everything I had open.

[–] ravenstine 2 days ago

I mentioned that when I said that BSODs were way more common. Although I didn't experience PC stability from their inception, I was around since at least the Windows 3.1 days, and definitely ran into a lot of BSODs. However, I am more forgiving of that lower stability during that era for a few reasons. Firstly, mass market PC software was still a relatively young thing at the time and the amount of information available to programmers was a mere speck of what we have now. There was also a lot of pressure on firms to get software to market as fast as possible. For what was available at the time, I'd say that software could have been way worse than it was. If software today was frequently causing system crashes, then I would judge that a lot differently because that's a problem we definitely should have solved by now. From what I remember, crashes didn't occur so often that PCs became unusable. For the most part, they worked, and worked pretty well. Software back then, for better or worse security practices, was more straight forward than much of today's. I come across more bugs than I ever did even 20 years ago. Sure, operating systems are more stable now, which apparently has afforded us the ability to ship more bugs.

[–] bhelkey 2 days ago

Being more forgiving of software in the past and judging current software by a higher bar is just another way of saying that software was worse in the past.

I agree that we have huge advantages today. I agree that the best practices, tools, and computing resources are much better today than they were in the past.

But these don't invalidate OP's point.