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What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

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Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#41

Post by yuhong »

derekp7 wrote: post #23
userbinator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if this was not "really impressive", but the norm today. Things would be so much better if we'd no longer need constant patches-upon-patches to fix what should've been fixed before release (while sometimes introducing new bugs), and users would spend more time doing useful work with the software instead of fighting it. As the article notes, this is all possible with a minimal of tools and resources, so I…

Except back then, you had your app running on the machine all by itself. And there was no need for security -- if putting in a magic input string caused some weird behavior, well, "don't do that". Whereas today that would be considered a security bug (even if your app isn't directly used by non-trusted sources, it could be in a deep toolchain used by some other app). Not to mention, that when you shipped for an Atari…

What is sad is that the Morris worm dates back to late 1988 when MS was starting the development of OS/2 2.0 and NT OS/2. Yea, I am talking about the decision to use a flat address space (instead of segmented) with default image base addresses which was what made buffer overflow etc exploits really popular.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#42

Post by ScottBurson »

josephlord wrote: post #40
wpietri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Basically we've shifted from emphasizing high MBTF to low MTTR. Especially with techniques like continuous deployment and gradual rollout, it's relatively painless for all involved. And I think it's necessary. The explosion in software complexity, platform complexity, and platform variation means that trying for absolute perfection is much more expensive than it was. And that's before we even look at the much hi…

MTTR?

Mean Time To Repair.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#43

Post by ghaff »

josephlord wrote: post #40
wpietri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Basically we've shifted from emphasizing high MBTF to low MTTR. Especially with techniques like continuous deployment and gradual rollout, it's relatively painless for all involved. And I think it's necessary. The explosion in software complexity, platform complexity, and platform variation means that trying for absolute perfection is much more expensive than it was. And that's before we even look at the much hi…

MTTR?

Mean Time To Repair. In other words, parent poster is saying that we tolerate more failures because we can fix them quickly.

I basically agree although it's obviously a vast oversimplification. I'd probably argue that we tend to have architectures that are often more resilient as well.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#44

Post by yuhong »

kabdib wrote: post #20
eps wrote: post #7

> Now in those days when you almost never sent out patch disks; generally you had to wait 6-8 months to ship a new version and you had to charge the customer for the update. Trapeze only needed one floppy but Deltagraph shipped on something like 10 disks. Paying for hundreds of thousands of disks is expensive; add to that printing of manual updates and boxes and shipping and you never did this casually. So the versio…

Shipping ROMs was the same deal. You wrote an OS, or a game, and tested the crap out of it. Then you sent out for mask ROMs and waited like six weeks for them to come back, and you hoped that they worked. My office mate was told to make three versions of the game she worked on, each ORG'd at a different address so that manufacturing could pick whichever configuration was cheaper to make. Q/A was able to test two of t…

Newton was the same deal (except that we had a way to patch the ROMs through a snazzy jump table system).

In fact, I think the classic Mac OS used this model too.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#45

Post by rdl »

I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s -- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386 running 386BSD.

MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-commercial (to fit within NSFnet guidelines) was really different from the small-computer marketplace happening at the same time. There were definitely commercial packages, but my only real contact with that kind of stuff was commercial OS and vendor support contracts for big machines I had shared accounts on (e.g. Sun support contracts, and some packages being harder to get than others).

There was a period in the mid to late 1990s when it was an NT vs. Linux (well, UNIX in general, but mostly Linux by then) question -- NT 3.51 and 4.0 became viable. But, before that, the high-end timeshare world and the small-computer world were totally separate.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#46

Post by blantonl »

rdl wrote: post #45

I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s -- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386 running 386BSD. MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-commercial (to fit within N…

Don't forget the NT vs OS/2 wars.... that was far more brutal in those days.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#48

Post by eng_monkey »

moconnor wrote: post #16

I can really recommend Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia journals for a look into game development in the 80s. Every time I read one I come away energized with the same passion for creating something unique. Edit for link: http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/

Similarly, the ebook by Bob Pape about how he developed the ZX Spectrum version of R-Type is a very interesting document on how computer games were developed at the time and how game companies worked.

It is freely available at his Web site http://bizzley.imbahost.com/

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#49

Post by yuhong »

blantonl wrote: post #46
rdl wrote: post #45

I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s -- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386 running 386BSD. MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-commercial (to fit within N…

Don't forget the NT vs OS/2 wars.... that was far more brutal in those days.

Ah, this MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, and I do have bad words against MS for it. Remember "Microsoft Munchkins" for example?
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