Your comment reminds me of a pretty jarring experience moving from embedded systems into mobile (iOS) apps. I asked the lead how we know the software is “done” and can ship. He looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. “We are never done. We just keep developing and releasing until they tell us to work on something else.” This idea that your program can be done and you release the final version is turning into a relic from a lost age.
It’s also sad from the user’s point of view: as updates get more automatic, you have to take deliberate action to stay on an old, working, familiar version. If you’re not careful, you can reboot and your software looks and behaves entirely different. And in the web world it’s impossible! You don’t even have a choice. You are running whatever version the developer decrees you should be running.
It'll reappear eventually. But until it does, Mozilla has decreed that I shall use an out of date web browser.
Bring on the vulnerabilities...?
Well, with maybe the exception of Office 6.0 which I heard described as 'so full of bugs it practically walks itself' It came on about 9 floppy disks. I had to install it in an office with about 15 standalone PCs and so had to do the disk 1, disk 2,.. shuffle for each PC.
Not everything was better back then.
The same can not be said of present-day stuff, which seems to change on a weekly basis. I don’t know how anyone will ever be able to use the old Facebook again once they shut it off.
Today that isn't the case. It's all about continuous rollover. So in 20 years the software that "survived" will be the same old software that we're talking about now (from the 90s and earlier). All of the present-day software will be continually updated and may be unrecognizable in 20 years.
Oh, and the keys were prone to hardware failure, and replacement took weeks to arrive.
Someone wrote a whole kernel for Tic80 on RPi : https://github.com/msx80/BareMetalTic80
I can imagine a modern retro computer with modest specs running on A8 processor, in a compact form, with a super minimal kernel and TCP stack that can do 90% of tasks we need to do today.
Checking weather, ordering delivery, booking tickets, reading email, chatting, calls, etc.
I want this to exist!
Apart from the speed and convenience of clicking a link to visit a web app, those attributes all sound to me like tradeoffs that benefit the developer at the expense of the user.
The software I remember, from the 90’s and earlier, put the user in control. Licenses were one time costs and they were perpetual. Software was much more thoroughly tested before being released to manufacturing (through the golden master process) since it was a major gaffe to release a broken app that had to be updated with fresh physical media.
Unlike today, there was never any sense that the developer could pull the rug out from under your feet, at any moment. The title of the article is a testament to the (now archaic) notion that software might be considered “complete”. That it seems so quaint is such a terrible shame.
Now we have so much software offered for rental only, like Adobe stuff, or ad-driven free sites which are liable to changed drastically (with no option to skip the “upgrade”) or cancelled outright like so many Google products [1].
Somehow, in the past few years I’ve picked up a nostalgic fever for retro computing [2] which has only intensified since Covid began. I don’t know how to explain it, but here we are. Perhaps I’m just getting old and finding it increasingly difficult to relate to young people, who seem to jump from one social media fad to another, like locusts.
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[2] https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933...