Were people careful with bugs and documentation? I remember the Internet blowing up one day because every Windows install was sending every IP on the Internet

Were people careful with bugs and documentation? I remember the Internet blowing up one day because every Windows install was sending every IP on the Internet a virus, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. (And yes, Unix also had similar worms, though they largely predate me!) Word used to crash and corrupt your entire novel. There was no online banking. I'm not sure the rose-colored glasses are a realistic take on changing software quality. Today, the tools are available to move quickly and maintain quality. You probably do what was months of manual testing every time you save a file, and certainly every time you commit a set of changes. There are fuzz testers to find the craziest bugs that no human could even imagine. There are robots that read your PR and point out common errors. HN really likes to pan on software quality, but "I don't like this feature" is not a bug per se, just a company you don't like. There are a lot of those, but there are more lines of code than ever, and a lot more stuff works than 30 years ago. I think we, as a field, are getting better.