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Warp wrote:
> OTOH, 20 years ago most serious operating systems (and consequently other
> software) were running huge servers with hundreds, if not thousands of
> users.
... but still running a fairly small collection of software compared to
what tends to run on machines today. The Linux boot partition today is
multiple times the size of the biggest hard drives you could put on
"desktop" computers 20 years ago, and orders of magnitude bigger than
the disk space available on a mainframe 40 years ago. 10 years ago I
was impressed when the boss brought in a Windows machine with 128Meg in
it. Nowadays you can't even boot Windows in that, let alone do something
useful.
And of course, the hardware is flakier too. That's why NASA puts
20-year-old technology into satellites and space ships. You read the
google papers, and you see they run some job and it takes on the average
1000 machines, 7 minutes, and during that time on average two machines
will have some sort of hardware failure. Your software can seem really
flakey when your swap space has an unreliable sector in it - btdt.
Plus, software changes much faster today. People in a university aren't
going to use a compiler last updated (except for bug fixes) 10 years
ago. Nobody these days uses a C++ compiler last updated before the STL
was created. Nobody uses a database engine that has been stable for 10
years, or even an OS that has been stable for 10 years.
It's easy to make a system that doesn't crash. Get it working, then stop
dicking around with it. Windows servers are quite reliable, for example,
because people don't install new stuff and then take it off, plug in
random USB devices, try out new screen savers, etc. They're very careful
with their upgrades, just like they are for Linux.
> This was rather common especially at universities and other similar
> academies: You were lucky if you had access to an actual desktop computer.
Given the power of desktop computers 20 years ago, I'd disagree with the
"lucky" part of that. ;-) The stupidest thing the CIS department did at
my undergrad school was to start teaching assembler on Commodore PETs
instead of on the mainframe.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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