No we damn well DID NOT. This is one of the most infuriating lines used all over for dismissing concerns about modern things and developments. "Oh why do we need vaccines/antibiotics, we survived just fine without them" except, you know, for all the hundreds of millions of deaths. Minor detail that. Mere "survival" through gross inefficiency is not a real yardstick.
By the same token, "it used to suck really badly" in programming and the result was awful practices, crashing, and security problems out the wazoo. We sort of "survived" that by a mixture of just plain eating the heavy losses and having them be somewhat mitigated by virtue of simply having less surface area for damage since less stuff was tech based or connected. Infrastructure was less built up. But times have changed and standards for, and value of, security/stability/supportability have increased dramatically.
Yes in a sufficiently large group I'm sure you'll be able to find individuals engaging in hyperbole about any such thing on the internet. But that doesn't in turn mean that there aren't very real, very serious concerns raised around the context of modern practice. Dismissiveness based on bad historic practice is not merely uncalled for, it's just plain weird.
Edit to add: another issue a lot of this dismissive comments tend to ignore is cost & skill. Yes, great things have been done with options we'd now consider subpar in the past, that's what they had to work with. But those things were done by the best of the best, with huge budgets, lots of experience and so on. A very important part of advancement is allowing the "same thing" to be done more cheaply by more people, and in turn be used for wider array of applications.
No we damn well DID NOT. This is one of the most infuriating lines used all over for dismissing concerns about modern things and developments. "Oh why do we need vaccines/antibiotics, we survived just fine without them" except, you know, for all the hundreds of millions of deaths. Minor detail that. Mere "survival" through gross inefficiency is not a real yardstick.
By the same token, "it used to suck really badly" in programming and the result was awful practices, crashing, and security problems out the wazoo. We sort of "survived" that by a mixture of just plain eating the heavy losses and having them be somewhat mitigated by virtue of simply having less surface area for damage since less stuff was tech based or connected. Infrastructure was less built up. But times have changed and standards for, and value of, security/stability/supportability have increased dramatically.
Yes in a sufficiently large group I'm sure you'll be able to find individuals engaging in hyperbole about any such thing on the internet. But that doesn't in turn mean that there aren't very real, very serious concerns raised around the context of modern practice. Dismissiveness based on bad historic practice is not merely uncalled for, it's just plain weird.
Edit to add: another issue a lot of this dismissive comments tend to ignore is cost & skill. Yes, great things have been done with options we'd now consider subpar in the past, that's what they had to work with. But those things were done by the best of the best, with huge budgets, lots of experience and so on. A very important part of advancement is allowing the "same thing" to be done more cheaply by more people, and in turn be used for wider array of applications.