For applications, it is, as you wrote, inferior in speed, as well as many other attributes (memory usage, CPU usage, plenty of others). That is not the point. The point is that web apps are distributed instantly to users, on demand, anywhere, extremely cheaply, with no middlemen necessary. (The web is not the only technology with these traits, but in practice it is the only widespread one.)
Apart from the speed and convenience of clicking a link to visit a web app, those attributes all sound to me like tradeoffs that benefit the developer at the expense of the user.
The software I remember, from the 90’s and earlier, put the user in control. Licenses were one time costs and they were perpetual. Software was much more thoroughly tested before being released to manufacturing (through the golden master process) since it was a major gaffe to release a broken app that had to be updated with fresh physical media.
Unlike today, there was never any sense that the developer could pull the rug out from under your feet, at any moment. The title of the article is a testament to the (now archaic) notion that software might be considered “complete”. That it seems so quaint is such a terrible shame.
Now we have so much software offered for rental only, like Adobe stuff, or ad-driven free sites which are liable to changed drastically (with no option to skip the “upgrade”) or cancelled outright like so many Google products [1].
Somehow, in the past few years I’ve picked up a nostalgic fever for retro computing [2] which has only intensified since Covid began. I don’t know how to explain it, but here we are. Perhaps I’m just getting old and finding it increasingly difficult to relate to young people, who seem to jump from one social media fad to another, like locusts.
> The title of the article is a testament to the (now archaic) notion that software might be considered “complete”. That it seems so quaint is such a terrible shame.
Your comment reminds me of a pretty jarring experience moving from embedded systems into mobile (iOS) apps. I asked the lead how we know the software is “done” and can ship. He looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. “We are never done. We just keep developing and releasing until they tell us to work on something else.” This idea that your program can be done and you release the final version is turning into a relic from a lost age.
It’s also sad from the user’s point of view: as updates get more automatic, you have to take deliberate action to stay on an old, working, familiar version. If you’re not careful, you can reboot and your software looks and behaves entirely different. And in the web world it’s impossible! You don’t even have a choice. You are running whatever version the developer decrees you should be running.
Oh man. So painfully true. As I write this message on the latest firefox mobile that upgraded automatically. And is one of the worst software upgrade I have ever seen. And there is no easy way to revert to what worked before of course. At least the most recent patch brought back the back button (no joke). What a treat!
That reminds me, I need to go dig an old version of Firefox out of one of those shady APK websites so I can get tab queue functionality back. I used that easily 20 times every day to remember URLs and such ("Share > with Firefox").
It'll reappear eventually. But until it does, Mozilla has decreed that I shall use an out of date web browser.
>Software was much more thoroughly tested before being released to manufacturing (through the golden master process)
>since it was a major gaffe to release a broken app that had to be updated with fresh physical media.
Well, with maybe the exception of Office 6.0 which I heard described as 'so full of bugs it practically walks itself'
It came on about 9 floppy disks. I had to install it in an office with about 15 standalone PCs and so had to do the disk 1, disk 2,.. shuffle for each PC.
Microsoft is not exactly the kind of company that I would use if I were to show what quality release management meant back in the floppy days. But lots of other companies got it right. That said, Office was super complex and an extremely large and rushed package (the competition was gaining ground).
That is true. But some companies got it very, very right. They made software that has stood the test of time.
The same can not be said of present-day stuff, which seems to change on a weekly basis. I don’t know how anyone will ever be able to use the old Facebook again once they shut it off.
Weekly? Several times per day. Mind you, I'm going with the flow and I'll be more than happy to do things that way too, it is the competitive arena we live in and if you can't fight them join them. But I do feel that the code I wrote in the past was more mature, higher quality and had more longevity in it simply because the pace wasn't so idiotically high.
Isn't that just survivorship bias? The old software that survived either had massive lock-in or was good enough to survive. In another 20 years, some software from today will survive, and that too will be the stuff that was big enough, caused enough lock-in, or was good enough to stand the test of time.
It is and it isn't. My point is that back then it wasn't possible to update software continuously. Thus, the development model was very much focused around putting out discrete, fully functional versions.
Today that isn't the case. It's all about continuous rollover. So in 20 years the software that "survived" will be the same old software that we're talking about now (from the 90s and earlier). All of the present-day software will be continually updated and may be unrecognizable in 20 years.
The oldest proprietary software I came across (approx. 1995) had a LPT hardware key and stopped working as soon as you disconnected it. You could connect your printer through that key (it was a pass-through), but it behaved weirdly.
Oh, and the keys were prone to hardware failure, and replacement took weeks to arrive.
While despicable, and typical for certain classes of professional software, dongles were never required for any of the software I’ve ever used. Even the Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator did not require anything other than a serial number.
I can imagine a modern retro computer with modest specs running on A8 processor, in a compact form, with a super minimal kernel and TCP stack that can do 90% of tasks we need to do today.
Apart from the speed and convenience of clicking a link to visit a web app, those attributes all sound to me like tradeoffs that benefit the developer at the expense of the user.
The software I remember, from the 90’s and earlier, put the user in control. Licenses were one time costs and they were perpetual. Software was much more thoroughly tested before being released to manufacturing (through the golden master process) since it was a major gaffe to release a broken app that had to be updated with fresh physical media.
Unlike today, there was never any sense that the developer could pull the rug out from under your feet, at any moment. The title of the article is a testament to the (now archaic) notion that software might be considered “complete”. That it seems so quaint is such a terrible shame.
Now we have so much software offered for rental only, like Adobe stuff, or ad-driven free sites which are liable to changed drastically (with no option to skip the “upgrade”) or cancelled outright like so many Google products [1].
Somehow, in the past few years I’ve picked up a nostalgic fever for retro computing [2] which has only intensified since Covid began. I don’t know how to explain it, but here we are. Perhaps I’m just getting old and finding it increasingly difficult to relate to young people, who seem to jump from one social media fad to another, like locusts.
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[2] https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933...