On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Howard Winter wrote:
{Quote hidden}> On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:14:23 +0200, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
>
>>> 1) Software ought to be good enough that it doesn't require
>>> significant support.
>>
>> Yeah, same for cars!
>
> Right, but back in The Real World...
>
> Cars wear out, rust away, fail to comply with new regulations...
>
> Software doesn't usually wear out (y2k notwithstanding) but it can
> fail to cope with new situations - changes in the law, economic
> situation (new taxes, new field sizes due to inflation, etc), and new
> ideas that people come up with.
Software wears out because there is a market pressure driving hardware
upgrades (including in domains where this is not mandated).
> DOS was a fairly support-free operating system, but almost nobody uses
> it now because someone thought of WIMP interfaces (we won't argue
> about who that was!). Before PCs there were mainframes and
> minicomputers - and the software that they ran is mostly obsolete now
> through no fault of the programmers - the World moved on and their
> stuff wasn't relevant any more. Some may have been ported to the new
> environments as they came along - that's still "support" !
DOS was not a support-free os. It used to take serious magic to make
device drivers co-exist peacefully and the occasional corrupted disk
would cause nightmares.
Peter
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