Win98 Was Stable

Windows 98 was a stable and secure operating system.

It was stable because you could simply reinstall everything if it failed, or restore it from a tape backup. You’d have a tape backup because you assumed Win98 would crash.

Win98 was secure, at least during its heyday, because this was prior to the exponential growth of internet viruses.

A case for the robustness of Win98 (second edition) is hard to make from a technical standpoint. But in practice, I never had problems with it. Subsequent Windows operating systems increased in complexity and, in my opinion, were rushed to production (release “updates” have multiplied almost as quickly as viruses). I feel we now live in a very uncertain computing environment.

Disagree, please. I’m surely not accounting for the increased sophistication of today’s software. But how much of that sophistication do we need, and at what price? And not a dollar cost so much as a demand for more of our time.

If hardware and software are ends in themselves, then we live in the best of all possible worlds, and it only gets better. But to the extent computers are tools intended to accomplish real-world tasks, we need better mousetraps.