Arny Krueger wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message

I do blame Microsoft for reducing people's expectations with regard
to computer reliability.

As if IBM, the BUNCH, Apple, Sun or any of the rest are really any better?

For the most part, yes. Microsoft and Apple were the first of the OS vendors
who went out of their way to obscure as much as possible at the system level
and keep people from looking inside. They were the first folks to sell
microcomputers that had no programming interface of any sort, and that were
designed primarily for users running canned packages.

Apple did a much better job of this than Microsoft did. They still ignored
things like real pre-emptive multitasking and per-process memory protection
that were considered standard everywhere else in the computer industry, and
they are still continuing to reinvent things that were standard everywhere
else in the computer world in the 1970s. But they progressively improved the
reliability of their systems, while Microsoft did not, to the point where
the new OS X is actually not so bad.

As far as Sun goes:

grissom% uname -a
SunOS grissom 5.8 Generic_108528-27 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60
grissom% uptime
11:29am up 385 day(s), 2:03, 8 users, load average: 2.01, 2.32, 2.82
grissom%

which is about typical uptime specs around here. I had a 4.1.4 machine
up for more than two years without a reboot, but I eventually did something
stupid.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."