B
Bob Cain
John said:The irony, one of many, is that increased compute power has almost
always made computers less reliable and harder to use.
Yeah, who can forget the reliability and user ease of the '60s. So
reliable that we designed mainframes with almost all data paths within
the system being parity checked and with elaborate microcode retry
mechanisms to work around the detected failures.
I'm sure most people would prefer OS/360 TSO to Win XP too. Even that
was a big step backwards from having the machine operator help you
feed through punched card decks. I can't imagine how people today
cope without the 8" thick paper abend dumps to locate their bugs.
It's sure been a long, strange, downhill trip.
Bob