> knowing that a bug meant burning new EPROMs made you think twice or thrice before you declared something "done".
> Schedules were no less stringent than today;
So … how did that work, then? I know things aren't done, and almost certainly have bugs, but it's that stringent schedule and the ever-present PM attitude of "is it hobbling along? Good enough, push it, next task" never connecting the dots to "why is prod always on fire?" that causes there to be a never ending stream of bugs.
With no pms you dealt directly with the boss and you managed your own tasks so you had a hard deadline and showed demos and once it was done support/training. It was waterfall so not finishing on time meant removing features or finishing early meant added additional features if you had time . Everything was prod. You needed to fix showstopper bugs/crashed but bugs could be harmless (spelling fr example) or situational and complex or show shoppers. You lived with them because bugs were part of the OS or programming language or memory driver experience at the time.
As my old boss once said (about 30 years ago actually!) when complaining about some product or the other "this happens because somewhere, an engineer said, 'fuck it, it's good enough to ship'."
> Schedules were no less stringent than today;
So … how did that work, then? I know things aren't done, and almost certainly have bugs, but it's that stringent schedule and the ever-present PM attitude of "is it hobbling along? Good enough, push it, next task" never connecting the dots to "why is prod always on fire?" that causes there to be a never ending stream of bugs.