Operating systems have gotten a whole lot more reliable since Windows 95. The way I remember it, Windows 98 would regularly corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled. I'd done it so many times that I could pretty much recite the license key from memory. Modern Linux is rock solid. Even Windows 10 is very stable. They might be 'bloated', but modern OS's are way, way more stable.
corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled
In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state.
I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
Or of just a power outage or driver causing a loss of write back cache.
95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels.
If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
I am not so sure. I've ran 98 on bad hardware, and it crashed regularly. So much so, that I installed linux on it already in 1998, and that was much more stable. It only crashed now and then. No doubt in both cases the poor hardware was the cause of it.
Anyway, two years later I got a brand-new laptop with good hardware that was running 98se. As far as I remember, it didn't crash during normal usage. By then I was studying computer science, and would sometimes write or run programs that would make it crash, but that was on me. I did dual boot in Linux, and that didn't have any problems on that machine either.
Fun fact, I still have that laptop, it's over 25 years old now, but it still works and runs Windows 98se!
> If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
I agree. Remember Plug'n'Play? It was so bad that we used to call it Plug'n'Pray. It frequently caused PC crashes. Modern OSes are a miracle in how stable they are with drivers.
I've seen enough stories of power outages permanently damaging SSDs, that if you have bad power from your utilities provider and can't get them to fix it, then I recommend investing in a UPS.
Or a modem driver reading the stream and writing shit - I still have some of those burping mp3s. But if you blame this solely on the OS then you may be thinking very nostalgically too.
Hell, it most of the time worked on some combo of the cheapest parts - modern systems wont even get to UEFI boot part on the parts of the same quality.
Operating systems were always more reliable than Windows95 from the day it was introduced. Protected memory and process privilege were not exactly unknown when DEC was selling VMS. Or for that matter when Microsoft was selling Windows NT. That the FAA cheaped out then, choosing an inferior system with no technical merit, is prelude to the current problem.
I've noticed that operating systems can get very flaky when the disk space gets tight. It seems that too much code does not check for disk full write failures.
It was still very much like modern systems. If you didn't install, uninstall, or aggressively reconfigure things they were pretty stable, and controlled changes could be achieved. Some of the problem though was that the systems required a lot of that to do anything fun with them at home.
