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Agreed. Or debuggers that would take out the entire OS. Or a bad driver crashing everything multiple times a week. Or a misbehaving process not handing contr
by noir_lord 1y ago
Agreed.
Or debuggers that would take out the entire OS.
Or a bad driver crashing everything multiple times a week.
Or a misbehaving process not handing control back to the OS.
I grew up in the era of 8 and 16 bit micros and early PCs, they where hilariously less stable than modern machines while doing far less, there wasn’t some halcyon age of near perfect software, it’s always been a case of things been good enough to be good enough but at least operating systems did improve.
- malfist 1y agoRemember BSODs? Used to be a regular occurrence, now they're so infrequent they're gone from windows 11
- kazinator 1y agoI remember Linux being remarkable reliable throughout its entire life in spite of being rabidly worked on. Windows is only stabilizing because it's basically dead. All the activity is in the higher layers, where they are racking their brains on how to enshittify the experience, and extract value out of the remaining users.
- wlesieutre 1y agoAnd the "cooperative multitasking" in old operating systems where one program locking up meant the whole system was locked up
- krior 1y agoGone? I had two last year, lets not overstate things.
- ClimaxGravely 1y agoStill get them fairly regularly except now they come with a QR code.
- dist-epoch 1y agoMostly because Microsoft shut down kernel access, wrote it's own generic drivers for "simple" devices (USBs, printers, sound cards, ...) and made "heavy" drivers submit to their WHQL quality control to be signed to run.
- Podrod 1y agoThey're definitely not gone.
- ponector 1y agoI guess that is because you run it on old hardware. When I've bought my Asus ROG expensive laptop I had bsod almost daily. A year later with all updates I had bsod once in a month on the same device and windows installation.
- vel0city 1y agoIf you have faulty hardware no amount of software is going to solve your problems (other than software that just completely deactivates said faulty hardware). The fact you continued to have BSOD issues after a full reinstall is pretty strong evidence you probably had some kind of hardware failure.
- ponector 1y agoBut there was no reinstall in my case. Years goes by and further in time there are less and less bsod. My point is if you are using the same "old" modern hardware, bsod is very rare.
- vel0city 1y agoAh, sorry, I misread your comment. Glad you're getting a better experience with your device over time!
- spartanatreyu 1y agoDepends, if you install games with anti-cheat they can often conflict and cause BSODs. It's why I don't play the new trackmania.
- stiglitz 1y agoAs a Windows driver developer: LOL
- Yoric 1y agoI grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent. There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc. More generally, as you hint to, desktop operating systems were crap, but the software on top of it was much more comprehensively debugged. This was presumably a combination of two factors: you couldn't ship patches, so you had a strong incentive to debug it if you wanted to sell it, and software had way fewer features. Come to think about it, early browsers kept crashing and taking down the entire OS, so maybe I'm looking at it with rosy glasses.
- pezezin 1y agoYou are looking back with rosy glasses indeed. Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reboot. Oh and at least in the '90s you could already ship patches, we used to get them with the floppies and later CDs provided by magazines.
- Yoric 1y agoFWIW, I was speaking of the 80s.
- vel0city 1y agoIt truly depends on the quality of the software you were using at the time. Maybe the software you used didn't result in many issues. I know a lot of the games I played as a kid on my family's or friend's Win95 machines resulted in system lockups or blue screens practically every time we used them. As I mess around with these old machines for fun in my free time, I encounter these kinds of crashes pretty dang often. Its hard to tell if its just the old hardware is broken in odd ways or not so I can't fully say its the old software, but things are definitely pretty unreliable on old desktop Windows running old desktop Windows apps.
- yibg 1y agoOr just http without the s. We take it for granted now, but not even that long ago http was the standard.
- crottypeter 1y agoBut at the time that software was "new" and unreliable.
- beyarkay 1y agoah yes, one person understands the point I was trying to make (: