> We had premptive multitasking operating systems and large C compilers and 
> ray tracers and modellers and music sequencing software and complex 
> computer games and so on and so forth.

If you're referring to your Amiga, then it was the same with my Acorn.  But 
those machines were orders of magnitude less complex than a PC today.

> I don't really see how the software M$ writes is any "bigger" or "more 
> complex" than what existed before.

Ha.  Compare what Windows XP does with your Amiga OS.  Think about hardware 
support, multi-processor support, multi-user support, multi-APIs for 
everything, wireless networking, and a million other things.

> I've also seen software that's much more reliable. *cough* POV-Ray. When 
> was the last time you saw it crash?

Apart from the beta, haven't seen it crash - but often it shows weird 
results or fails to parse.  And if such a relatively small program such as 
POV with a tiny user-base has bugs, then I think MS has done pretty well 
with Windows.

> Similarly, have you *ever* seen Linux crash? [A huge number of Linux 
> applications are hopelessly buggy, but the OS itself seems rock-steady as 
> far as I can tell.]

When was the last time you saw XP itself crash?  I know I can't remember the 
last time (and I use it regularly on 4 different machines with very 
different hardware), apart from when there was faulty hardware.

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