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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

I used Sun workstations and DEC Alpha early nineties, apart from the responsiveness of the window system (due to the fact they weren't being asked todo much compared with today), what I remember most is the reliability - we didn't shutdown our machines in the evenings or weekends and they'd happily carry on running without apps crashing for over a year, often without air conditioning.

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My absolute favourite memories of using Suns were NeWS/HyperNeWS - I've never used anything like it since (pretty much the Lisp of the 2D graphics worlds).

> we didn't shutdown our machines in the evenings or weekends and they'd happily carry on running without apps crashing for over a year, often without air conditioning.

I really don't understand this. Apart from the minor detail that modern (e.g. younger than a decade or so) PCs can go to stand-by mode and wake up within seconds at most, I've yet to come across commodity hard- and software that doesn't do the same.

The current up time of my machine is 4 days 13 hours, 20 minutes - because I ran some system updates last week. Without those, even my mediocre machine running all the software I use on a daily basis (IDEs, web browser, several terminals) just keeps running for weeks on end and never ever crashes.

Am I just lucky or is this "crashes and blue screens"-business just a persistent memory from the late 90s and early 2000s?

There's a difference in weeks and years. I think the main reason was the OS and nearly all hardware was developed and tested by the same company - no 3rd party graphic card kernel drivers etc.

It was also a fact that a lot of these machines were expected to be up 24/7 - running mail/file servers etc. OS updates, including kernel updates wouldn't require rebooting.

Yes a kernel update would require rebooting. But that happened maybe once a year, or even less often. The update was delivered on tape and it was probably a multi-day project for the admins to prepare for the installation.

The current uptime on my PCs is always since the last power outage, currently 275 days. My laptop has been up for 40 days (with a lot of suspending.) I know Windows machines are forced to go down a lot, but I don't think other systems have that problem.

Everybody is required to go down a lot unless they're ignoring security patches. I see the Ubuntu "System restart required" message at least once a week.

> Am I just lucky or is this "crashes and blue screens"-business just a persistent memory from the late 90s and early 2000s?

the choice of components determines if a windows machine bluescreenes all the time or accumulates uptime like a pro.

hard to make a informed choice thou because the market is moving very fast and so "luck" is a huge factor.

If you wanted months of uptime in the early 1990s it had to be some kind of Unix - even Linux was not yet reliable enough.

Actually the Suns had an issue with their harddisks getting stuck after being turned off for 2 weeks, they’d be unable to start again.

I never shut down my 486 Linux box in the 90’s, either. It had 6+ months uptime under 1.x series kernels.

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