Reality is that software is way better than it once was
… Reality is that software is way better than it once was. Standards are so much higher now. When I started with computers it was expected that to get any program to run at all you'd need to find a local wizard first. I spent way too much of my childhood frantically repacking MS-DOS 640kb low mem to try and get the latest game demo running, or reallocating IRQs to try and get the new Sound Blaster to work at the same time as my mouse. Five years later Plug'n'Play was mostly working, Windows mostly worked, but it was expected that every app you bought would crash every five minutes. Consumer software that didn't crash like crazy was a sort of mythical science fiction scenario. Additionally, EVERY app had a splash screen, because hard disks were so freaking slow and RAM was so scarce that starting even an app that'd be considered very simple by today's standards would spend a minute just flushing everything else you had loaded out to swap, including things that you probably needed, like the Start button. …
Original discussionComputers are amazing. So why is software so terrible?88 source comments · at import