4 ms·

I'd say 2000s, 90s gave us windows 9x and ME which were far from being reliable. Same for Mac Os 7 & 8.

by gommm 5y ago

mixmastamyk 5y ago
No, VMS and Unix were robust by the late '70s. Mainframes earlier. 386BSD debuted in '92.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  NT 3.x, OS/2 for the enterprise folks.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  Most people weren't running VMS nor Unix as their desktop OS in the 90s. Post-90s we had OS X (Unix) and Windows 2000/XP (NT)...basically the servers became consumer desktop operating systems because Microsoft and Apple realised exactly your point (and desktop hardware became powerful enough to run it too). And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      > Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced. > Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it. > Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation. Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user. > NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D. As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with. This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.

I'd say 2000s, 90s gave us windows 9x and ME which were far from being reliable. Same for Mac Os 7 & 8.

by gommm 5y ago

I'd say 2000s, 90s gave us windows 9x and ME which were far from being reliable. Same for Mac Os 7 & 8.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

No, VMS and Unix were robust by the late '70s. Mainframes earlier. 386BSD debuted in '92.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
NT 3.x, OS/2 for the enterprise folks.
hnlmorg 5y ago
Most people weren't running VMS nor Unix as their desktop OS in the 90s. Post-90s we had OS X (Unix) and Windows 2000/XP (NT)...basically the servers became consumer desktop operating systems because Microsoft and Apple realised exactly your point (and desktop hardware became powerful enough to run it too). And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    > Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced. > Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it. > Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation. Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user. > NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D. As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with. This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.