Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video]
At what point in the past were our programs stable, robust and just worked? Perhaps it was before my time, but DOS and windows (3.11, 95) would crash, constantly. Blue screens of death, infinite loops that would just freeze my computer, memory leaks that would cause my computer to stop working after a day.<p>I now expect my computer to stay on for months without issues. I expect to be able to put it to sleep and open it in the same state it was. I expect that if a website or a program errors, my OS simply shrugs and closes it. I expect my OS to be robust enough so that if I enter a usb or download a file I'm not playing Russian roulette that it might contain a virus that would destroy my computer.<p>In the past I would close my computer at the end of every day because otherwise it will simply crash some time in the night.  I would run de fragmentation at least once a month. Memory errors and disk errors were common, and the OS had no idea how to overcome it.
Crashes were so common, you just shrugged and learned to save often.