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> You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files. I feel like people may be view

> You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files. I feel like people may be viewing the past with rose colored glasses. Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. Most things didn't "just work", but required extensive tweaking to configure your ram, sound card... to work at all.

amelius 5mo ago
This is not just the past. I still have headaches configuring my video card to work with the right CUDA drivers, etc. The tower of abstractions we're building has reached a height that actually makes everything more fragile, even if the individual pieces are more robust.
- kirubakaran 5mo ago
  We just need one more layer of abstraction to fix that, and everything will be fine
  - willmadden 5mo ago
    I'm vibe coding this presently. Update soon.
hnav 5mo ago
Quality issues are a different vertical within the space of software/user misalignment. The sort of issue the author talks about is more like the malware of the 90-00s era: the software deliberately does something to screw the user.
6keZbCECT2uB 5mo ago
I remember when the computer crashed and the user hadn't saved recently, we blamed the user.
- Groxx 5mo ago
  It's sad, but they should've compulsively hit save after every few letters - it's documented very clearly on page 404 of the manual. It's a real shame that such things couldn't be done automatically until recently, early-2000-era CPUs just weren't sophisticated enough to run advanced, reactive logic like that.
  - jjmarr 5mo ago
    My parents indoctrinated me as a child to constantly hit save because they grew up with that. It was a part of our cultural expectations for "basic life skills to teach children".
  - piker 5mo ago
    Serializing a document was non-trivial for the first two decades of personal computing. Auto-save would have destroyed performance.
    - Groxx 5mo ago
      Indeed, not like today, where we're closer to the metal and have as few abstractions as possible. Maybe we'll be able to use high level languages again after this RAM shortage passes.
echelon 5mo ago
> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. THIS. I lost so much work in the 90s and 00s. I was a kid, so I had patience and it didn't cost me any money. I can't imagine people losing actual work presentations or projects. Every piece of software was like this. It was either the app crashing or Windows crashing. I lost Flash projects, websites, PHP code. Sometimes software would write a blank buffer to file too, so you needed copies. Version control was one of my favorite discoveries. I clung to SVN for the few years after I found it. My final major loss was when Open Office on Ubuntu deleted my 30 page undergrad biochem thesis I'd spent a month on. I've never used it since.
- algoth1 5mo ago
  Open Office on Ubuntu 11.10 user here. I can confirm it froze frequently and you would lose everything. it was incredibly frustrating
  - jeffreygoesto 5mo ago
    Windows 95 Word was also bad. Some poor non-CS student brought his thesis to our computer pool and worked from Floppy with the only copy he had. Panic mode on when the backup file and original did not fit on that floppy any more and Word asked to swap disks for an empty one. We advised him to just continue swapping, eventually Word will have that backup file on the other disk. It worked after an ennerving amount of floppy swaps...
borski 5mo ago
Wait, I literally still hit Ctrl-S constantly, usually a few times in a row. Have people outgrown this unnecessary habit? Haha
algoth1 5mo ago
Manually editing config files thanks to an obscure thread so that your printer can actually be recognized by the OS
mikert89 5mo ago
alot of software engineering, especially in complex systems, is still just tweaking retries, alarms, edge cases etc. it might take 3 days to even figure out what went wrong
justinclift 5mo ago
> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. That was in the Windows world. Maybe in the Mac world too? No so much in the *nix world. Windows seems to have improved its (crash) reliability since then though, which I suppose is nice. :)
- kgwgk 5mo ago
  And yet the word "crash" appears quite often in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
  - justinclift 5mo ago
    Yep, it's not surprising that a book called something HATERS Handbook would be pretty focused on the negatives, even if they're rare. ;)
jrm4 5mo ago
Still though -- once you got a workflow, no matter how terrible, it strongly tended to continue to work that way, and it was still much easier to diagnose, fix, and just generally not have unexpected behavior. This is the issue; agents introduce more unexpected behavior, at least for now. My gut is that always on "agents who can do things unexpectedly" are a dead-end, but what AI can do is get you to a nice AND predictable "workflow" easier. e.g. for now I don't like AI for dealing with my info, but I love AI helping me make more and better bash scripts, that deal with my info.
moralestapia 5mo ago
Hmm ... no? I used computers back then and many things just worked fine. I found Windows XP way more predictable and stable than any of its successors.
- smcin 5mo ago
  The comment said "in the 90s". Windows XP was only released 10/2001. So how stable were Windows 95, or Windows 3.x, IYE?
  - moralestapia 5mo ago
    Ah, fair point! Windows 3.x was pretty good, imo. Windows 95 bad. Windows 98 overall good but like 7/10.
nacozarina 5mo ago
lol be honest that lunacy was unique to Microsoft, never had to do that with FrameMaker on SunOS
_puk 5mo ago
And then having to learn ctrl-q the minute you started working in the shell.. Muscle memory is a bitch!
danaris 5mo ago
I don't know what computers you were using. I had occasional crashes, sure, but unless you had some very dodgy computers, it seems like you're overcorrecting for those supposed rose-colored glasses. I never knew anyone in the '90s who was constantly living in fear of their programs crashing and losing their work.
- hrimfaxi 5mo ago
  Were they using Word? That was absolutely a fear of mine at the time.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    I used Word—mainly on Mac, version 4.01—all through middle and high school for my homework, and never had any particular problems with it. Frankly, I think it was much more stable then than it is now.

amelius 5mo ago

This is not just the past. I still have headaches configuring my video card to work with the right CUDA drivers, etc. The tower of abstractions we're building has reached a height that actually makes everything more fragile, even if the individual pieces are more robust.

kirubakaran 5mo ago
We just need one more layer of abstraction to fix that, and everything will be fine
- willmadden 5mo ago
  I'm vibe coding this presently. Update soon.

hnav 5mo ago

Quality issues are a different vertical within the space of software/user misalignment. The sort of issue the author talks about is more like the malware of the 90-00s era: the software deliberately does something to screw the user.

6keZbCECT2uB 5mo ago

I remember when the computer crashed and the user hadn't saved recently, we blamed the user.

Groxx 5mo ago
It's sad, but they should've compulsively hit save after every few letters - it's documented very clearly on page 404 of the manual. It's a real shame that such things couldn't be done automatically until recently, early-2000-era CPUs just weren't sophisticated enough to run advanced, reactive logic like that.
- jjmarr 5mo ago
  My parents indoctrinated me as a child to constantly hit save because they grew up with that. It was a part of our cultural expectations for "basic life skills to teach children".
- piker 5mo ago
  Serializing a document was non-trivial for the first two decades of personal computing. Auto-save would have destroyed performance.
  - Groxx 5mo ago
    Indeed, not like today, where we're closer to the metal and have as few abstractions as possible. Maybe we'll be able to use high level languages again after this RAM shortage passes.

echelon 5mo ago

> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. THIS. I lost so much work in the 90s and 00s. I was a kid, so I had patience and it didn't cost me any money. I can't imagine people losing actual work presentations or projects. Every piece of software was like this. It was either the app crashing or Windows crashing. I lost Flash projects, websites, PHP code. Sometimes software would write a blank buffer to file too, so you needed copies. Version control was one of my favorite discoveries. I clung to SVN for the few years after I found it. My final major loss was when Open Office on Ubuntu deleted my 30 page undergrad biochem thesis I'd spent a month on. I've never used it since.

algoth1 5mo ago
Open Office on Ubuntu 11.10 user here. I can confirm it froze frequently and you would lose everything. it was incredibly frustrating
- jeffreygoesto 5mo ago
  Windows 95 Word was also bad. Some poor non-CS student brought his thesis to our computer pool and worked from Floppy with the only copy he had. Panic mode on when the backup file and original did not fit on that floppy any more and Word asked to swap disks for an empty one. We advised him to just continue swapping, eventually Word will have that backup file on the other disk. It worked after an ennerving amount of floppy swaps...

borski 5mo ago

Wait, I literally still hit Ctrl-S constantly, usually a few times in a row. Have people outgrown this unnecessary habit? Haha

algoth1 5mo ago

Manually editing config files thanks to an obscure thread so that your printer can actually be recognized by the OS

mikert89 5mo ago

alot of software engineering, especially in complex systems, is still just tweaking retries, alarms, edge cases etc. it might take 3 days to even figure out what went wrong

justinclift 5mo ago

> Computing in the 90s meant hitting ctrl-s every 5 seconds because you never knew when the application you were using was going to crash. That was in the Windows world. Maybe in the Mac world too? No so much in the *nix world. Windows seems to have improved its (crash) reliability since then though, which I suppose is nice. :)

kgwgk 5mo ago
And yet the word "crash" appears quite often in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
- justinclift 5mo ago
  Yep, it's not surprising that a book called something HATERS Handbook would be pretty focused on the negatives, even if they're rare. ;)

jrm4 5mo ago

Still though -- once you got a workflow, no matter how terrible, it strongly tended to continue to work that way, and it was still much easier to diagnose, fix, and just generally not have unexpected behavior. This is the issue; agents introduce more unexpected behavior, at least for now. My gut is that always on "agents who can do things unexpectedly" are a dead-end, but what AI can do is get you to a nice AND predictable "workflow" easier. e.g. for now I don't like AI for dealing with my info, but I love AI helping me make more and better bash scripts, that deal with my info.

moralestapia 5mo ago

Hmm ... no? I used computers back then and many things just worked fine. I found Windows XP way more predictable and stable than any of its successors.

smcin 5mo ago
The comment said "in the 90s". Windows XP was only released 10/2001. So how stable were Windows 95, or Windows 3.x, IYE?
- moralestapia 5mo ago
  Ah, fair point! Windows 3.x was pretty good, imo. Windows 95 bad. Windows 98 overall good but like 7/10.

nacozarina 5mo ago

lol be honest that lunacy was unique to Microsoft, never had to do that with FrameMaker on SunOS

_puk 5mo ago

And then having to learn ctrl-q the minute you started working in the shell.. Muscle memory is a bitch!

danaris 5mo ago

I don't know what computers you were using. I had occasional crashes, sure, but unless you had some very dodgy computers, it seems like you're overcorrecting for those supposed rose-colored glasses. I never knew anyone in the '90s who was constantly living in fear of their programs crashing and losing their work.

hrimfaxi 5mo ago
Were they using Word? That was absolutely a fear of mine at the time.
- danaris 5mo ago
  I used Word—mainly on Mac, version 4.01—all through middle and high school for my homework, and never had any particular problems with it. Frankly, I think it was much more stable then than it is now.