That software did a lot less, however, and you just had to live with bugs. I knew people who just learned that they couldn’t use a feature without crashing, or had to disconnect from the internet to print, had to write their own math formula because a built in function was wrong, etc. and just worked around it for years.
The first company I worked for in the 90s had a C codebase which seemed like it was half #ifdef or runtime version checks because they had to support customers who rarely updated except when they bought new servers, and that meant that if some version of SunOS, DOS/Windows/etc. had a bug you had to detect and either use a work around or disable a feature for years after the patch had shipped.
I do agree that stability, especially on the UI side, has serious value but my nostalgia is tempered by remembering how many people spent time recovering lost work or working around gaps in software which had been fixed years ago. I think the automatic update world is better on the whole but we need some corrective pressure like liability for vendors to keep people from pulling a Crowdstrike in their testing and reliability engineering.
We still have to find workarounds for crappy software. But with a continuous update model, we waste more time fighting with bugs because the bugs are constantly changing. Every week you have to waste figuring out what broke now. No thanks.
Companies need to feel more pressure to ship software that doesn't have the bugs to begin with. That's the pressure that was eliminated.
These days, it's just "ship it and we'll fix it later" instead, which is a big part of why (in my opinion) software quality has been declining for years.
The first company I worked for in the 90s had a C codebase which seemed like it was half #ifdef or runtime version checks because they had to support customers who rarely updated except when they bought new servers, and that meant that if some version of SunOS, DOS/Windows/etc. had a bug you had to detect and either use a work around or disable a feature for years after the patch had shipped.
I do agree that stability, especially on the UI side, has serious value but my nostalgia is tempered by remembering how many people spent time recovering lost work or working around gaps in software which had been fixed years ago. I think the automatic update world is better on the whole but we need some corrective pressure like liability for vendors to keep people from pulling a Crowdstrike in their testing and reliability engineering.