It feels like rose-tinted glasses. While lots of low-hanging fruit had to be plucked to be shippable, there was still plenty of software which mandated specific hardware/software combinations or (worse) had major bugs which weren't patched but had workarounds documented in the manual, and if you weren't actively reading the manual, your newly-purchased software just wouldn't work (and if it was something low-level, that may mean you have to reinstall the OS).

Then there was stuff like rwall, which could be used to scrawl a message across basically every terminal connected to a networked Unix box in the world by accident [0][1], and it was far from the only insecure-by-design Unix software in widespread use.

It's interesting to watch youtubers like clabretro [2], NCommander [3], and Old Computers Sucked [4] who have documented the slog that was setting up and patching networking equipment, obscure Microsoft products, Netware, Unixes and Unix hardware, old Linux distros, etc. We take so much for granted these days. We don't even have to think about C/++ standards compliance outside the occasional compiler bug, much less the myriad of mutually-incompatible POSIX implementations that helped Microsoft win the Unix wars.

The fact that you can just build a PC with no prior experience or IT knowledge after watching an hour-long youtube video rather than having to spend weeks researching hardware compatibility or futzing about with IRQ levels, recompiling kernels, and messing with autoexec.bat/config.sys is a testament to how far we have come. You don't even have to think about drivers anymore unless you have specialized equipment.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759965

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/@NCommander

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked

Significant Raise of Reports