zlacker

>>mconle+(OP)
This just reminds me of constant "things worked so fast on my Windows 95 machine back in the day with 16MB RAM". Meanwhile any piece of software could crash your PC and it did so regularly (I still keep spamming save in software because of those days) and internet was a pandoras box.

I wonder how much overhead in modern OS/PC user experience comes from security/stability abstractions and tools.

>>moonch+bc
I think it mostly comes from the fact that computers are so fast now people write apps without worrying too much about performance - apps have always grown to use whatever resources are available. But when you app had to run on a pentium with 16MB of memory - you actually had to work hard on performance because you had such limited resources.

>>jacobs+be
Yes but people have this nostalgic rose tinted glasses of software from that era - it was hot garbage that crashed all the time because they had so many constraints. Yeah GC introduces a bunch of overhead - but it also means you don't get segmentation faults, memory corruption, etc.

Modern software is much more reliable than the software from that era, people nowadays complain when a button isn't working - back then a button could randomly freeze my entire PC.

>>moonch+gi
> it was hot garbage that crashed all the time because they had so many constraints

Correlation != causation. I started using PCs heavily in the mid 90s, and yes "Illegal Operations" were abound. However, the SDLC has also come a long way with testing, automated QA, etc. Back then there was a lot more "wild west" going on for both hardware and software. Generally, practices are much more mature by default nowadays.