>Blue Screen of Death >Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood.
I was a Windows system administrator from 1997 through 2013. In the beginning, we had issues with the blue screen of death in Office Professional and Windows 98. It turned out that when HP wrote their printer drivers for the LaserJet 4000 printers, they used an optimizing compiler, and it dynamically loaded floating point emulation.... and let it get unloaded, thus when you needed to compute page layout to print.... blue screen of death.
Once I solved that, we never had problems again, for over a decade!
Once we got to Office 2000 Professional, we stopped upgrading, and enjoyed 12 years of stability.
The only real problems were with the gigabytes of email people kept around, most of it in their "Deleted Items" folder, used as a filing cabinet, and the Exchange server that was full. They wouldn't let me buy a spare machine for to test out the email server backups, which naturally turned out to be a prayer in the end. 8(
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>Nothing was secure Nothing has changed, it's still not secure, no matter your choice of OS. We're not running HURD or Genode on everything, or even Qubes. It's ambient authority everywhere, which is nuts in an era of persistent megabit internet.
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>Software came on unreliable physical media That's what backups are for. I had a folder of all my CDs, that was included in my system backups. So, I could restore the domain server, restore the backup filesystems, then reinstall everything, without using any media other than the Windows Server CD (actually, a copy of it, with the serial number written on it)
That Office 2000 install should still work today, without buying it again. It's unlikely to get memory holed.
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>Give me higher-level programming languages that abstract common pitfalls from C and C++.
Yep... Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and now Lazarus/Free Pascal have done that since the beginning.