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> When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users […] They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once
by Someone 3y ago
> When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users […] They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once a day or once a week.
That didn’t require a survey. The OS didn’t have memory protection and typically got patched at startup by ten or so different extensions from both Apple and numerous third parties.
The rules for patching were unclear, to say the least (1), so an extension might, for example, have a code path where it allocated memory inside a patch to a system call that might be moving memory around (a no-no, as the memory manager wasn’t reentrant)
And that had to run code that typically was compiled with a C compiler of the time, with very, very limited tools to prevent out of bounds memory writes.