Earlier quoted context omitted.
About 15 years ago, I worked at a startup that had a server with 5 years of uptime!
I have a home server with 1301 days of uptime.. (last year it survived a move without rebooting)
Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#22Nowadays you don't even get CLOSE to 49 days uptime before Win10 forces you to restart due to updates ;s
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#23For me, it failed at around 25 day (49.7/2?). I believe the documentation at the time [since fixed] might have had GetTickCount() returning an integer instead of an unsigned integer. I had a devil of a time tracking it down!
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#24This brings up a good meta point: people who like to complain about the quality of software in the modern world almost certainly didn't live through the early[1] days of the industry. This sounds crazy to modern ears, but at the time the idea of a desktop system actually staying booted for a whole month was weird and alien. They just didn't do that. Commercial unixes were better. It was routine to find servers that h…
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#25Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#26Is there a good way to test for bugs like this during development? Since it’s not particularly realistic to pause development for two months to see what a given build does after that long.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#27From what thine is this? It says "There IS a bug ... NOW patched" Should make no sense anyway but I see no time attached to this.
The cited MS KB has been archived starting November 9, 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20041109020858/http://support.mi... It is dated August 2004 (it is revision 3.2) but the patch (for Windows 98) has a date: Release Date: Jun-04-1999
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#28Nowadays you don't even get CLOSE to 49 days uptime before Win10 forces you to restart due to updates ;s
In the late ‘90’s I used to brag about my Linux uptime being over a year. And that was a system was directly exposed to the internet. I can’t imagine how many unknown security holes it had during that time.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#29Is there a good way to test for bugs like this during development? Since it’s not particularly realistic to pause development for two months to see what a given build does after that long.
Software will always have bugs, we've chosen to approach it as "find the bugs before the customer" rather than "stomp out every possible bug". Because you are right, we don't get 2 months to pause and fix bugs, and also customers will always do some crazy configuration or workload you didn't have a test case for.