Comment by LatencyKills
7 days ago
I was a developer at Microsoft in the 90s (Visual Studio (Boston) and Windows teams). I won't claim that software back then was "better," but what is definitely true is that we had to think about everything at a much lower level.
For example, you had to know which Win32 functions caused ring-3 -> ring-0 transitions because those transitions could be incredibly costly. You couldn't just "find the right function" and move on. You had to find the right function that wouldn't bring your app (and entire system) to its knees.
I specifically remember hating my life whenever we ran into a KiUserExceptionDispatcher [0] issue, because even something as simple as an exception could kill your app's performance.
Additionally, we didn't get to just patch flaws as they arose. We either had to send out patches on floppy disks, post them to BBSs, or even send them to PC Magazine.
[0]: https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2013/10/12/having-a-look-at-th...
From the user perspective, Windows and Office certainly crashed more frequently back then. I don't mean that as a criticism of the Microsoft developers at the time: they did some great work within severe constraints. But overall the product quality is far better now.
I wouldn't take that as criticism; you are 100% correct. But that instability was a direct result of the issues I mentioned above: the ring transition protection/implementation was absolutely horrible; 3rd-party developers would discover a useful function in NTDLL and start using it in unintended ways, etc.
Do you remember the CSRSS Backspace Bug? [0]
A simple: printf("hung up\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b"); from ring-3 would result in a BSOD. That was a pretty major embarrassment.
After retiring, I started volunteering my time to mentor CS students at two local universities. I work with juniors and seniors who have no idea what "heap memory" is because, for the most part, they don't need to know. For many developers, the web browser is the "operating system".
I absolutely love using Python because I don't have to worry about the details that were major issues back in the 90s. But, at the same time, when I run into an issue, I fully understand what the operating system is doing and can still debug it down to assembly if need be.
[0]: https://jdebp.uk/FGA/csrss-backspace-bug.html
I can't imagine how much of a breath of fresh air Python / Java must have been if you were used to write typical business crud apps (and server software) in C/C++ (with no sanitizers / modern tooling to speak of).
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