Daniel Taylor <random@???> wrote:

> It's scary how unreliable our systems used to be compared to now.

Were they ? Or did they just have different fragilities ?
Example:
There's the discussion here about having essential tools available without having all filesystems mounted. Go back to the times under discussion and we had relatively primitive filesystems without journalling - so an uncontrolled shutdown (crash, power loss, ...) was highly likely to cause some filesystem damage and need at least a fsck to fix it. Now we routinely have journalling filesystems and I note that in most cases there's a quick "replay the log, were Ok to go" step during the next boot after a crash.
So there's one aspect where we now have more reliable systems.

But, our systems are so much more complicated now. Once over we had "static" hardware, and when changing it you had to (or the device driver installation had to) run some admin program that would update the static device nodes in /dev. As long as the hardware didn't change, your /dev would reliably have the right nodes in it - and you could manually change the device files if needed and the changes would be persistent. Now we have dynamic /dev nodes - which while very convenient is also subject to a a certain amount of "plug and pray", and fixing issues can mean delving into non-trivial config files to get a persistent change.
So one aspect where systems are less reliable.

Overall I suspect that there isn't much of a net gain or loss - just a different set of problems.