Modern Software Gets Worse, But Computing's Past Was Genuinely Terrible

While modern software grows increasingly buggy—producing 10x more code without proportional error reduction creates inherently buggier applications—the nostalgia for computing’s past ignores how genuinely terrible it was. Windows dominated with 95% market share but crashed constantly from buggy device drivers and OS resource leaks. Users lost hours of work in applications without autosave, then compulsively hit Ctrl+S for decades. When Google Docs instrumented Ctrl+S in 2010 despite full autosave, the keystroke still ranked in the top 5 user actions, a lasting trauma response.

The period offered almost no security: a nine-year-old could bypass password-protected screensavers with Task Manager. Advertising malware and viruses routinely compromised machines; worms knocked entire networks offline via Word macro exploits. Hardware constraints forced developers into strange workarounds that created new bugs. Disk fragmentation mandated manual defragmentation utilities, leaving unprepared computers taking 20 minutes to boot.

The past did enforce one quality standard: physical distribution meant software couldn’t be patched after release, creating a floor quality couldn’t slip below. Modern software’s degradation reflects scaling challenges and continuous deployment cycles rather than lost programming ability.