It was shit because it had to be, though.<p>Windows 3.1, for example. It had a very elegant Virtual Machine Manager with pre-emptive multitasking and true process isolation... and then GUI programs were all placed into a single cooperatively-multitasked event loop, because anything else would have killed performance. And the OS also had to continue to support IO device drivers written for DOS—that could disable interrupts system-wide and thus freeze the computer!—because otherwise your (horrible, un-QAed) scanner wouldn&#x27;t work.<p>I fully believe that software hasn&#x27;t gotten much better over the last 40 years. The hardware constraints have simply relaxed to the point that we&#x27;re no longer forced to make as many Faustian bargains.