No. Rose-colored glasses. Back when software was purchased in shrink wrap, quality was definitely a crap shoot. It was normal to reboot your DOS machine because

No. Rose-colored glasses. Back when software was purchased in shrink wrap, quality was definitely a crap shoot. It was normal to reboot your DOS machine because the memory hack you used for one program didn't work for another (himem.sys and emm386.com). FAT required regular defragmentation and integrity checks. You rebooted just about every day up to the early 2000s because any desktop OS running at the time became more and more unstable with memory leaks as the days walked on. Games were buggy but didn't get regular patches you could just download on your 2400 baud modem. Software is more complex than ever before by a wide margin, but for every Electron bloatware there's a ton of sleek Swift-driven amazement. And speaking of Electron, as maligned as it is, those apps are still Unicode-compatible, networked, and self-updating as table stakes. There are some amazing old programs out there (have you seen the amazing engineering behind coreutils?), but things are most definitely not worse off today.