Systems got orders of magnitude more complicated, time to release got orders of magniture shorter, and everything got a whole hell of a lot better.
Djikstra and Hoare are the only ones who tried to advance a higher standard and yet beyond naming an award for one and singing praises of the other, the field has continued to accept lesser standards.
It's not apples-to-apples, but if you look at the number of lines of code executed before a noticeable bug it's in the trillions.
You could, but the argument would be false there. Building a car, constructing a house, sewing a shirt, writing a book, etc. are all not significantly more complex than they were decades ago. Software is orders of magnitude more complex than decades ago.
You would be incorrect - having worked in the industry for a short while, I can attest that modern automobiles are at least an order of magnitude more complex than something from, say, the 60s.
They still operate on the same mechanical principles, but we exploit these in vastly more complex and efficient ways. If you want to make this argument, then you also have to accept that computers are "just" current running across silicon.
No, the reason why we get away with this is because replacement is easy. You get a car right the first time because a large recall can cost in the hundreds of millions, and be logistically impossible to execute. For us it's a simple "Hey! We has update! Yes/No?" dialog box.
But that's compared to Moore's law that a computer becomes an order of magnitude more complex roughly each eighteen months for twenty or more orders of magnitude increase from the sixties.
Also, modern cars do have lots of bugs in sense of suboptimal behaviors. They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.
The complexity of code - not the compiled binary - the text you punch into the machine and what it semantically represents, has not really gotten that much more complicated over the years. We've introduced several new paradigms since the COBOL mainframes: object orientation, functional, to name a couple. It'd be hard to argue, though, that it follows Moore's Law. Not even close.
> They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.
This is an important point: people who expect flawless behaviour from software because other fields of engineering demonstrate it, IMHO, are misguided. Aircraft engineers work incredibly slowly because the consequences of fucking up is perhaps thousands of deaths, and billions in liabilities. Car engineers are the same on a lesser scale. There's no need to expect flawless, 100% perfect function when you don't need flawless, 100% perfect function.
We could spend 20 years developing the perfect toaster that will never, ever burn your toast. Or we can spend 2 months on something that will get it right 97% of the time, and just move on with our lives.
Software is different not just because it is more complex, but because computers are much more finicky than roads and people. A logic flaw in software can cost millions; an equivalent flaw in a book will likely never be noticed.
But sure, if you had a terminal, a spare IBM system (the iSeries is probably the lowest end) set up to support SNA, and then a networking controller to attach the 3270 to, you could probably get Lynx working.
Alternately, if you just want the effect, you could just pick up an old green/black monochrome display and hook it up (via a physical adapter) to any VGA card. Buggy implementations excepted, all VGA cards should be backwards-compatible to MGA.
Add a nice IBM Model M keyboard and you'd be all set. I suspect someone has probably done this as a case mod before (if not ... I might); stick a modern mobo in an old IBM PC case with the original monitor and keyboard.
Terminal-based systems often have a very steep learning curve, but I've seen many cases where they were better designed and met business needs better than COTS replacements.
Granted, those terminal-based systems were probably phenomenally expensive when they were put in (mostly in the 70s or early 80s, that I saw), and I suppose it's possible that after 15-20 years we have a biased sample that only represents the best of the breed, but they got the job done.
I judge how good things are by the human element. That hasn't changed. The software industry is as inclined as always to engage in death marches, shortchange quality, seek imaginary silver bullets, and devalue experience. In short it isn't fundamentally different at all.