Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Not so many years ago, software that wasn't 100% crash-free was 
> unacceptable. Today this is considered "normal". And it's all due to M$.

  OTOH, 20 years ago most serious operating systems (and consequently other
software) were running huge servers with hundreds, if not thousands of
users.

  This was rather common especially at universities and other similar
academies: You were lucky if you had access to an actual desktop computer.
Usually all you got was a dumb terminal connected to the main server,
which was used by hundreds of others at the same time.

  Back then it was completely unthinkable that the server would crash
randomly. It was more or less an assumption that the server could handle
without problems hundreds of simultaneous users logged in, all of them
running a half dozen of programs, and most of them using the internet
(or other network).

  Today the situation is more or less reversed at those same places:
You are lucky if you get to log in into a big server. Instead, you are
usually stuck with a crappy desktop computer (usually running Windows,
but if you are really lucky, Linux).

  AFAIK, in many of those places they run weekly - if not even nightly -
restores to all the desktop computers automatically (ie. wipe the system
clean and put a fresh copy of the system from a network disk, or whatever),
rather than to wait for them to rot. (Usually student files are stored in
a network disk rather than the computer itself.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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