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by steve19774 hours ago|

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Maintaining desktop apps was not really harder than maintaining the current Kubernetes-Web-App behemoths, at least in my experience.

by PaulHoule2 hours ago|

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Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on desktops for something that violates all the principles of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns about in his book Normal Accidents.

by chickensong1 hours ago|

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I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across multiple platforms that were released into the wild was an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. Operating a service reliably is of course filled with different problems, but at least you have full control.

by nogridbag5 hours ago|

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I wish we had a dedicated InstallShield engineer! I had to design and burn my own discs for the desktop apps I built. And for some reason, the LightScribe drive was installed on the receptionist's computer. I have no idea why, but I was a new hire and I didn't question much.

by jhatemyjob4 hours ago|

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Windows was so bad that it made the web bad. Imagine the world we'd be in today if Internet Explorer never existed.

by PaulHoule3 hours ago|

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Well back in the 1990s Apple was on the ropes.

Classic MacOS was designed to support handling events from the keyboard, mouse and floppy in 1984 and adding events from the internet broke it. It was fun using a Mac and being able to get all your work done without touching a command line, but for a while it crashed, crashed and crashed when you tried to browse the web until that fateful version where they added locks to stop the crashes but then it was beachball... beachball... beachball...

They took investment from Microsoft at their bottom and then they came out with OS X which is as POSIXy as any modern OS and was able to handle running a web browser.

In the 1990s you could also run Linux and at the time I thought Linux was far ahead of Windows in every way. Granted there were many categories of software like office suites that were not available, but installing most software was

   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install

but if your system was unusual (Linux in 1994, Solaris in 2004) you might need to patch the source somewhere.