5 ms·

Bugs in production software existed in all generations. In the mid 80s I worked on DEC Vax VMS systems. Our code was mostly written in FORTRAN and Assembly Lang

Bugs in production software existed in all generations. In the mid 80s I worked on DEC Vax VMS systems. Our code was mostly written in FORTRAN and Assembly Language. Our group dealt with the failures of the dev tools and bugs in the OS. Once we eliminated the fault was in our code (non trivial effort) we brought the proof of the problem to the vendor who responded in a not unreasonable time.( We did buy millions of dollars of equipment from them) Bugs existed in the early 90's DOS and Windows environments and we worked around them with no vendor support. Bugs existed in the mid 90's web dev and we worked around them.

jacquesm 5y ago
Yes, they existed. Yes, they were fairly rare. The two are not mutually exclusive. For instance, for the BBC Micro BASIC interpreter there was exactly one bug, which was found only by inspecting the assembler and someone realizing that this was an erroneous implementation. The simple fact that fixing bugs was hard and costly put such a premium on them that bugs were rare. Move fast and break stuff was an attitude that simply would not have worked back then. You tried your level best to get it right.