Worst 'Ware—Ever

For techie rubber-neckers, here's a list of the worst "software disasters" for PCs. Pretty solid, although I note that MS Bob was an interesting idea poorly done. It still needs to be done.

I'd also consider sticking all of OS/2 on the list as a penalty for what-might-have-been. Great PC OS from a company that, deep down, really didn't want the world to become PC-centric.

Comments

[Mo]

Where does the H&R comment software fit on this list.

I keeed, I keeed.

Do they have a list of great software that failed for lack of interest. I always like the Amiga OS, too bad it didn't do better.

[Eric Brown]

OS/2? Yeah, great OS, assuming you never wanted to print anything, and wanted to buy whole new programs (that didn't exist) to do the things you used to do before you dropped $400 on the new OS.

Seriously, OS/2 was a disaster from day one, and I speak as a person with 40-odd OS/2 installation floppies.

The only company that managed (barely) to sell a new OS that was completely incompatible with its previous OS was Apple, and they went from a 20% market share to a 4% market share.

[Good one!]

We can stop the thread now - Mo won.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Some of the early versions of WordPerfect had a good feature that I sometimes used, which was you could crash the computer at will with a three or four command macro that would use the 'flip screen' command, which was their early way of being able to keep two documents loaded at once. I used that feature a few times for unscheduled coffee breaks -- creash the computer, call up tech, gee man I don't know what it did, it just crashed...

[James Anderson Merritt]

I haven't trusted Dvorak's opinions or his standards of journalism since he tried to wheedle gossip out of me when I was working for personal computer pioneer North Star Computers in Berkeley, back in the late 1970s. (This was at a time, when Bill Gates was still coming to Homebrew Computer Club cocktail parties in the region. I always wondered what might have happened in the PC industry, had someone set Bill up on a life-changing date back in those days. Would we all be using OS/2 now?)

I think Dvorak is way off on his estimation of the UCSD P-System and the subsequent development of Modula-2. First, there is no way you can call programs in p-code "bloated." They executed relatively slowly, because they were interpreted, just like BASIC programs of the day. Later Pascals, such as Borland's Turbo Pascal (which was eventually folded into their Delphi integrated development environment), produced actual, executable machine code; although such executables ran much more quickly than the equivalent p-code programs, they also tended to take up more room in memory and on disk. P-code programs were extremely compact, one of the qualities that allowed a complete operating system and development environment to fit in a tiny Apple II computer, for example, with room left over for a significant application program to run along with its data. If Pascal encouraged bloatware in any way, it was through the ease with which developers could add features to their programs, and assemble together very large and ambitious software systems in a shorter length of time than before.

By Dvorak's own standards, I think that his inclusion of the Modula-2 programming language is mistaken. He freely admits that some software wasn't bad, it was merely disliked, and I think that Modula-2 falls in that category. M2 had its quirks and unfortunate aspects (as does Pascal, as does C, as does Java, ad infinitum), but it also had a compellingly great power: to allow the developer to encapsulate and organize code into separate modules that could be individually tested and debugged, then put on the shelf as part of an ever growing software "parts bin." From that bin, the developer could assemble final application packages of arbitrary functionality and complexity, similar to the way in which someone could assemble an electronic kit from a handful of integrated circuits and a few other components. Because all of the constituent parts would be pre-tested and pre-qualified, and their interfaces well-defined, final software would be more quickly realized, and would need less rigorous (read, "costly, time-consuming") testing before a sturdy, reliable product could go to market.

I programmed in Modula-2 for several years, myself, and found that it realized all of the aforementioned hopes, at least better than any other language of the day. As I alluded above with Pascal, however, that very strength might have been the language's downfall. Because it was so easy to put a solid product together with Modula-2, people rarely stopped with something solid. Instead, they decided to invest the time they saved using Modula-2 into creating ever-more baroque functionality, ever larger and uwieldy systems. Eventually, systems grew so large and complex, both for the user and the developers, that they collapsed under their own conceptual weight, despite the considerable ability of Modula-2 to mitigate the problems of over-ambitious design.

It is said, "a poor workman blames his tools," and boy, did Modula-2 take hits for disasters such as MicroPro Easy and a couple of others I can recall. Yet all the key concepts of Modula-2 eventually found their way into languages that later achieved some stature in the developer community: C++, Java, Delphi, and others. So, I don't think Modula-2's faults were as much in its design or implmentation, as in its marketing, and its misfortune to be associated with (and to ENABLE!) some of the more arrogantly ambitious projects of its day.

On the other hand, people who already thought in terms of component-based hardware development adopted Modula-2 as the vehicle for creating embedded software (automated factory control, microprocessors in cell-phones, microwave ovens, automotive control systems, etc.). They used the tool properly and got excellent results. You don't hear much about those success stories, because it is not a winning marketing strategy to hype the internals of a washing machine, a refrigerator, or a family sedan, beyond the gee-whiz aspect of mentioning that various systems are "intelligently controlled," I suppose.

One of the great qualities of both Pascal and Modula-2 that I most regret losing in the developer rush away from that family of languages, is the ability to pick up and readily understand code written months or years before, perhaps by other developers. Readbility of the program text was a value of the Pascal/Modula programming community. Features in the languages supported that value, assisting with the deciphering of even poorly written code. In contrast, it is a struggle to go back and makes sense of C or BASIC code that I once wrote, not to mention code written by others. This kind of difficulty raises the cost of maintenance and increases the pressure simply to scrap the existing code and create (at great expense) a completely new system. That process of churn is a large part of the explanation why 1) we still have horrendous levels of defects in modern software packages; 2)the industry has spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the last three decades, without developing a viable market in software componentry -- too many developers continue to burn resources, re-inventing the wheel; 3) you need gigahertz processor speeds and gigabytes of RAM and hard-drive to get anything useful done. About this last, sad state of affairs, read on...

After Modula-2 fell to earth, creator Niklaus Wirth and colleagues went back to the drawing board and tweaked the language into a truly "object oriented" version (i.e., amenable to software development paradigms that were new and trendy at the time, and have since become established). He called the new language Oberon, in homage to the astonishingly lean, but capable and rock-solid software that had allowed space probes to reach the outer planets safely and send back impressive data. Wirth's motto was Einstein's old quote, "make it as simple as possible, but not simpler." So impressive was the result, that students at the Swiss Federal Tech Institute (ETH) were able to create a reliable, high-performance operating system and program development environment for modern computers, which nevertheless ran quite snappily on the old 386 computers with clock speeds of just a few hundred MHz, and RAM of just a couple of hundred megabytes or so. The entire assemblage -- operating system, graphic development environment, networking and web-browsing support, etc. -- fit comfortably on a single floppy disc. That's right, not a CD, a floppy disc. No sluggishness or bloatware there. That's not to say that the Oberon OS and tools would necessarily pass muster in these days of heightened security concerns or "total quality" initiatives, but I would say that the first versions of the Oberon system were probably as trustworthy and capable as the first linux systems, and as amenable to improvement along commercial and industrial lines as linux has proven to be.

You don't believe me? That's one of the great things about the web: You don't have to! Oberon is still a going concern at ETH in Switzerland. Just visit the ETH Oberon website. You can download the Oberon system and play with it for free, and read more about the features and history of the system, to verify the Oberon-related assertions I have made here (and also to get another angle on the Pascal/Modula-2 story). Which is apparently more journalistic research than Mr. Dvorak ever did on this topic. His bottom 10 list is in the same league with the top- and bottom- 10 TV star/program lists that TV Guide publishes now and then, or the "Top 10 worst song" list that I believe was the object of a VH1 special recently. In other words: "infotainment"; unauthoritative fodder for conversation. And for the record, I happen to like the "Worst Song Ever," Starship's "We Built This City." I look forward to hearing it when the group plays at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in a couple of weeks. That's always a good time, which is more than I can say for the majority of what passes for computer industry punditry.

[Eric Pobirs]

I can't recall the last time Dvorak turned out to be correct on anything. Certainly more than a decade. This article demonstrates his ability to grind an old ax rather than make useful observations. Pretty much everything here is so dated that much of the readership will lack the direct experience to contradict it.

The fact is that Wirth's languages failed to catch on primarily because they weren't championed within the companies that mattered. If Microsoft had done a Visual Oberon it would have been huge.

Bob was very overambitious for the hardware of the era but that isn't why it failed. The biggest strike against Bob, a product intended to make novices more comfortable, was that the non-novices reviewing software didn't like it because it added a set of training wheels after they'd made the effort to master the system. Some of the same people thought the Mac GUI was a blight upon effective use of computing resources. Never mind usability for those who didn't care to pass the initiation into the club.

The funny thing is that many of the elements of Bob have become commonplace and widely accepted.

[James Anderson Merritt]

Patrick says "I hear BeOS mentioned very often in that context [great software that failed for lack of interest], but I never got to try it out myself."

I did, while Be was still a separate company. It may interest you to know that, even as late as 1997, movers-and-shakers inside the Apple sphere were conducting investigations and straw polls, trying to decide whether Apple should purchase Next or the BeOS, as their foundation for what later became OSX. When my turn came to vote, I went with BeOS. Unfortunately for me, when Apple went with Next, I ended up on the outs with them. Fortunately for me, Apple didn't purchase the assets, because later Palm did, for a relative song. I had Handspring stock at the time, which later became Palm stock. After a few sickening dips, that investment ended up doing fairly well for me, speaking as a small-time dabbler.

I'm still looking forward to seeing the legacy of BeOS kick some marketplace tail in PalmSource OS editions.

[mack t. knife]

It is indeed funny how some technologies that are obviously superior just don't make it in the marketplace. We end up having to wait many years until those features make their way in to future products -- if they appear at all.

I worked with OS/2 at home at at work for a couple of years. It was a wonderful thing to work with -- especially considering that alternatives at the time. Even the old 16-bit versions of OS/2 were wonderful. In 1989 as a test we had a 10mhz 286 with 6MB of RAM connected to a LAN, also connected to 3 modems uploading/downloading at the same time, and with other applications in memory. It ran without a hiccup.

We had to wait over a decade for that capability from Microsoft on much faster computers. (I'm not an MS basher. I work exclusively with MS products now after working mostly with *NIX for 13 painful years.)

Modula-2 was another one of those technolgies. The computer science department taught using Modula-2 when I was in school. No other language was available to teach the programming concepts.

After college I had to use a number of more primitive languages. I had to wait over a decade again before something as nice came about in Java and C#. But beautiful syntax of Wirth's languages lost out to the more macho and less readable C-style.

Even nice debuggers that I used in college didn't make it on to my desktop until 1.5 decades after graduation.

[Patrick]

Do they have a list of great software that failed for lack of interest.

I hear BeOS mentioned very often in that context, but I never got to try it out myself.

[from the article]
"The database manager [Microsoft Access] fared better, but eventually languished as SQL-centric products became the standard."

Huh? This passage made me think the author had idea what he was talking about. Access still seems quite popular to me. And it most certainly is "SQL-centric". Perhaps he meant to say "SQL Server-centric"?

[Bebo]

Modula-2 is making a bit of a comeback lately thanks to several freeware/open source projects working on new Modula-2 compilers, for example

Aglet Modula-2 (AmigaOS 4.0 only, but the author hinted at future Linux support)
home.ntelos.net/~tbreeden

GNU Modula-2 (gcc front end)
http://http://www.nongnu.org/gm2

Objective Modula-2 (C and llvm front end with extensions for Cocoa and GNUstep)
http://objective.modula2.net