> In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.
This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing, even with something like Windows 95 and the early internet. That started to fall apart around that time and now there are so many abstraction layers you have to choose what you specialize in.
And the fact that you couldn't just shit another software update into the update server to be slurped up by all your customers meant you had to actually test things - and you could easily explain to the bosses why testing had to be done, and done right, because the failure would cost millions in new disks being shipped around, etc. Now it's entirely expected to ship software that has significant known or unknown bugs because auto-update will fix it later.
This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing, even with something like Windows 95 and the early internet. That started to fall apart around that time and now there are so many abstraction layers you have to choose what you specialize in.
And the fact that you couldn't just shit another software update into the update server to be slurped up by all your customers meant you had to actually test things - and you could easily explain to the bosses why testing had to be done, and done right, because the failure would cost millions in new disks being shipped around, etc. Now it's entirely expected to ship software that has significant known or unknown bugs because auto-update will fix it later.