4 ms·

Some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. The bit about "five nines" reliability... big expensive servers and workstations got there but computers the average schm

by bbanyc 4y ago

Some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. The bit about "five nines" reliability... big expensive servers and workstations got there but computers the average schmo could afford never did. Frequent BSODs and system freezes were the norm. Now that we've moved on to proper multitasking OSes - which I admit are more complex and resource-intensive than their predecessors - crashes like that have become far rarer. On the other hand, this is clearly gesturing at something real. Computers and network connections are so much faster than they used to be, and yet webpages feel like they load just as slowly as they did in the dial-up days. Oh but we have so much better ad-tech and telemetry now! Because that's what I go on the internet for, the ads. Sure you gotta pay the bills, but how much of those bills are just for maintaining the advertising bloat versus the actual content? Well it's not like things were any better in the past. They were just a different kind of crummy.

qwery 4y ago
The five-nines was a commonly used marketing claim used by companies about the product/service/system they were selling, it wasn't and isn't being applied to a general context. I think the point being made there is not that all the computers/software used to be better/perfect but that the fact that such claims were used and became so prevalent shows that reliability was a feature and even an expectation.
arexxbifs 4y ago
I really resent Blow's talk, because while his points are mostly valid, the "facts" he presents to support his claims are poorly selected; some of them are outright lies. Five nines refers to overall system availability and it's not a lost metric, it still exists within the same sphere it's always existed: banking mainframes, data centers, hospital systems, emergency dispatch switchboards etc. It's never been used to market personal computers or software for them.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> computers the average schmo could afford never did. No they really did. Personal computers from the 80s will still boot (instantly) and perform perfectly today. I put modest servers together in the late 90s and they were still chugging away a decade into the next century. Uptimes of 3, 4 even 5 years were not unusual. We live in a disposable culture now. I think many of the people disputing that simply haven't lived long enough to experience high quality engineering.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t know, if anything OSs were quite unstable (I can’t speak for the 80s, but slightly later). When was the last kernel crash you’ve seen? We definitely have less of those now than we had in the 2000s.
  - rot13xor 4y ago
    I had to reboot my Windows PC at least once every few days back in the XP and Vista era. BSODs were common especially while gaming. I think moving GPU drivers out of the kernel into userspace made a big difference as GPU driver crashes are now recoverable. Nowadays I can go weeks or months without rebooting, only rebooting for forced security updates.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      I agree that this is good, but was it worth all the extra expenditure in energy, resources, and environmental damage that it took to achieve? Rebooting my XP machine every few days (or, really, just getting in the habit of shutting it down when I was done for the day) didn't seem like a huge burden at the time.
    - techdmn 4y ago
      I had a Windows XP machine that was pretty stable. I did reboot it sometimes. I now have a Windows 10 machine that is very stable, if you ignore the fact that it reboots itself All The Time. I have a dual-boot set up with linux as default. If I ignore the machine for more than a day or two it will have rebooted itself away from Windows into Ubuntu. Maybe this is a feature after all.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        I’m fairly sure that’s just the idiot “shutdown is replaced by hibernate” of Windows doing something hard to explain. In short, if you press on the shutdown option in Windows it will instead hibernate by default to make “boots” faster. You have to shift-+click on the poweroff option on the menu for the behavior you want. What probably happens is that it assumes it is the only OS and goes into another mode if not used for a few days? (This part I’m not sure about but the previous paragraph is true). But perhaps Ubuntu is your default in the boot order? Nonetheless, try to poweroff your windows with this shift+click and check if that solves the problem.

by bbanyc 4y ago

qwery 4y ago

The five-nines was a commonly used marketing claim used by companies about the product/service/system they were selling, it wasn't and isn't being applied to a general context. I think the point being made there is not that all the computers/software used to be better/perfect but that the fact that such claims were used and became so prevalent shows that reliability was a feature and even an expectation.

arexxbifs 4y ago

I really resent Blow's talk, because while his points are mostly valid, the "facts" he presents to support his claims are poorly selected; some of them are outright lies. Five nines refers to overall system availability and it's not a lost metric, it still exists within the same sphere it's always existed: banking mainframes, data centers, hospital systems, emergency dispatch switchboards etc. It's never been used to market personal computers or software for them.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> computers the average schmo could afford never did. No they really did. Personal computers from the 80s will still boot (instantly) and perform perfectly today. I put modest servers together in the late 90s and they were still chugging away a decade into the next century. Uptimes of 3, 4 even 5 years were not unusual. We live in a disposable culture now. I think many of the people disputing that simply haven't lived long enough to experience high quality engineering.

kaba0 4y ago
I don’t know, if anything OSs were quite unstable (I can’t speak for the 80s, but slightly later). When was the last kernel crash you’ve seen? We definitely have less of those now than we had in the 2000s.
- rot13xor 4y ago
  I had to reboot my Windows PC at least once every few days back in the XP and Vista era. BSODs were common especially while gaming. I think moving GPU drivers out of the kernel into userspace made a big difference as GPU driver crashes are now recoverable. Nowadays I can go weeks or months without rebooting, only rebooting for forced security updates.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    I agree that this is good, but was it worth all the extra expenditure in energy, resources, and environmental damage that it took to achieve? Rebooting my XP machine every few days (or, really, just getting in the habit of shutting it down when I was done for the day) didn't seem like a huge burden at the time.
  - techdmn 4y ago
    I had a Windows XP machine that was pretty stable. I did reboot it sometimes. I now have a Windows 10 machine that is very stable, if you ignore the fact that it reboots itself All The Time. I have a dual-boot set up with linux as default. If I ignore the machine for more than a day or two it will have rebooted itself away from Windows into Ubuntu. Maybe this is a feature after all.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      I’m fairly sure that’s just the idiot “shutdown is replaced by hibernate” of Windows doing something hard to explain. In short, if you press on the shutdown option in Windows it will instead hibernate by default to make “boots” faster. You have to shift-+click on the poweroff option on the menu for the behavior you want. What probably happens is that it assumes it is the only OS and goes into another mode if not used for a few days? (This part I’m not sure about but the previous paragraph is true). But perhaps Ubuntu is your default in the boot order? Nonetheless, try to poweroff your windows with this shift+click and check if that solves the problem.