Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible

Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have some nostalgia for the past: "software used to be better in the past" or "we've forgotten how to program like we used to" or "software quality has been declining for decades." And as someone who has used computers since 1990, I'm here to disabuse you of this notion. Software was horrible. Everything crashed all the time. Yes, there were great programmers like John Carmack who could keep the entire program in their head and iterate on thoughtful codebases over decades. No, they did not write a majority of the software that we used to use. Historical context Almost everyone in the world was on Windows. Windows peaked around a 95% market share, plus or minus a few percentage points based on your source. Yes, you probably knew someone with an iMac who would tell you that it was way better than a Windows machine, and they could prove it if anyone ever actually released applications for Macs. And yes, there were Linux distros like Debian where people could get real computing done[0]. But those were exceptions. Almost every computer user had a Windows machine and either an Intel or an AMD processor. And Windows had a lot of problems. There was one saving grace though: companies only got one chance to ship their software. At a certain point, it was going to be loaded onto a floppy disk or burned onto a CD or a ROM, put into a box, and mailed out. And that version had to work out of the box. So there was some quality floor that you couldn't slip below. How bad did it get? Here's a collection of things that I remember. This isn't linear; it's my collection of memories from 1990 and onward. Blue Screen of Death Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood. Let me introduce you to the song of my people, the Blue Screen of Death. The blue screen of death in Windows XP, Vista and 7, courtesy of Wikipedia This was Windows' version of a kernel panic. It happened right when you were in the middle of something. Or maybe you were doing nothing. It didn't matter: the blue screen was coming. Your computer crashed for a lot of reasons. First, device drivers. If you bought some new peripheral like a joystick, it'd come with a floppy disk or CD with device drivers. …