Now a few years later there's a zillion ways to do a video call, and Skype itself doesn't seem to be as good as it once was. I really wonder what on earth happened.
A lot of things really, really were. Some weren't.
Generally speaking, I do think that modern software tends to be worse in terms of usability, robustness, and resource usage. But it tends to be prettier and have more "features", so that's something.
15 years ago I'd reboot nightly because things were more stable.
20 years ago I debugged an issue in the JVM where it was deleting any file it touched (http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-...).
25 years ago it was normal for a computer to crash multiple times a day and wasn't uncommon for files that had been saved to get corrupted by a crash.
So yeah, very happy with modern software reliability.
> Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks
When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But we were new to video calls that worked at all and it seemed like a miracle!