The strangest concept for modern software engineers is that it had to ship bug free and it could never be updated with firmware patches. Shipping under those constraints brings a certain level of focus not experienced in modern design.
My dad used to work on certifying, servicing and making custom instruments for planes, subs, prototypes of all kinds of that era (60s to mid-90s).
His “lab” was basically all about testing and simulating environments for the instruments. He had tons of sayings about not having room for error in his line of work. This is as close as you can get from “building bridges” and to this day I don’t think I have seen this level of attention to detail/perfection in any other profession.
His job involved electronical engineering , mechanical engineering and programming amongst other things, not to mention a deep knowledge of the physics of these environments.
Back then also the tools or source of information that were available to them were quite crude compared to what we have now.
His spare time was all about flying, pimping his ham radio gear with all kind of “home made” electronics, build antennas and messing with computers. I guess he’d qualify as a “Hacker” nowadays.
I think the key is that in those days you didn't launch a product until you were absolutely sure it was going to work well, it was prototyped and debugged before it was launched. At least that is the impression one get with classical tech, solid reliability.
Umm...If you ship firmware today, sure it _can_ be updated, but almost nobody does update firmware, so yeah, that shit has to work when it ships.
Also, I've never been at a place that tested FW patches as well as full releases, so...do you _really_ want to install somebody else's random FW patch? I don't unless I have some known problem with a fix in the release notes...
