Comment by jsrcout

My first job was on a large-ish software product that ran on several completely incompatible platforms - various Unixes, early Windows, IBM mainframes, etc - and window systems. At first, making all of them happy seemed like annoying busy-work.

But our code was extremely clean and extremely well-factored, because it had to be. And after porting our product to the first two or three new platforms, the later ones were much much easier to do. Lesson learned.

Since (say) the 1990s, it feels like "the world" has slowly converged to pretty much (a) the browser; (b) desktop computers - Windows, Linux, Mac; (c) phones/tablets; (d) everything else (mainframes, embedded, industrial, what have you - stuff that most people will never deal with). And portability across different platforms is no longer all that important. Which is fine, but I do miss how the need for portability forced us to work with discipline and be relentless on quality.