Comment by grishka
1 month ago
> You had to take action to receive them.
What did that look like? Remember, back then, developers and users often had no after-sale communications at all. It was a technical impossibility more than anything. There was paper mail. There were telephone networks. That's about it.
I suppose you could occasionally call the developers of every software product you're using to ask if there is an update. I doubt anyone ever did that.
> Remember, back then, developers and users often had no after-sale communications at all.
They often had no pre-sale communications either, indeed no communication of any kind. It was just like buying a spatula or a pair of shoes. You went to a retail outlet and bought the software; the developer wasn't involved in the transaction at all. It was just the consumer and the retailer.
Sometimes there was a postcard you could send to "register" your purchase with the developer, and they'd send you mail about new versions or the like, but many people never registered.
Which leads to things not getting patched, more bugs, and more computers getting hacked. A great system...
I'll also add that if it was a big enough bug that it'd end up on the news and that's how people got informed. Otherwise, like you suggest, good luck. But it was possible.
It is baffling to me that we are having this conversation on Hacker News of all places. Aren't we a community of programmers? How in the world does any programmer think for a hot second that code is bug free? Last I checked formally verifying your code was 1) very rare and 2) still impractical if not impossible for anything of sufficient complexity. Unless we're formally verifying our code, I absolutely guarantee it has bugs. I know we have big egos, but egos so big that we think we're omniscient?
> How in the world does any programmer think for a hot second that code is bug free?
If you stop bloating the scope of your product by endlessly adding features no one ever asked for, you'll eventually run out of bugs.
Also, while it does not make you "omniscient", working with a known stack instead of following fashion does help a great deal with preventing bugs.
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I won't deny that all software is going to have bugs. But I think there has been a real shift in mindset over time. When it was harder to patch and, there was greater incentive to make each release a well-tested, coherent product that offered clear advantages over the last one. As it's become easier to patch, it's become more tempting to make each release just a sort of snapshot of what's more or less ready at a certain time, or alternatively a tiny increment. In other words, users are now the testers.
I'm not saying things were perfect in the era of physical-media software. I'm just saying there were some good practices that were made necessary by the constraints of that era that still can be beneficial today, even though we don't have those same constraints.
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