>I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless.
You sound young to me. Back in the 80s, computers were quite reliable, they just couldn't do that much. Floppies were extremely reliable; they had to be because the computers back then ran entirely on floppies. Only really expensive computers had hard drives until the very late 80s. It wasn't until the mid/late 90s that floppy drives became unreliable, because everyone stopped using them for anything except Windows drivers and the manufacturing of them (both drives and disks) went to low-cost areas and the quality went down the tubes. IRQ issues were a problem with DOS and Windows machines with ISA cards; before that on things like C=64s, there was no such thing. Security wasn't a problem back then, because no one was connected to a network; the best they had was telephone modems to connect to Compu$erve or BBSes. Viruses started becoming a real problem when everyone moved to DOS and downloaded stuff from BBSes. Back in the Apple ][ and C=64 days, security was unnecessary. Even over on the Internet-connected UNIX side (something mainly only used by college people, not by people with C=64s), security didn't become a big issue until Morris's worm in 1988.
As for CLI taking longer to learn, perhaps, but I remember office secretaries using DOS just fine, unlike these days where everyone has no clue what to do with a command line and is terrified of it. They might not have done really advanced stuff, but learning a few DOS commands like COPY and MOVE and DEL really isn't that hard for someone with half a brain.
As for "standardization", I don't know where you get that idea. Tons of people are having all kinds of problems with their Windows software not working on Windows 10, older peripherals not working on Win10, etc. How long did it finally take us to have some standardization on the web, after dealing with IE6 for so long? We didn't have these problems back in the text-only days. And again, over on the UNIX side, they had much better attempts at standardization with the X protocol, which allowed remote GUI access between completely different UNIX OSes, in the 80s. It took ages for anything similar to arrive on Windows machines.
You sound young to me. Back in the 80s, computers were quite reliable, they just couldn't do that much. Floppies were extremely reliable; they had to be because the computers back then ran entirely on floppies. Only really expensive computers had hard drives until the very late 80s. It wasn't until the mid/late 90s that floppy drives became unreliable, because everyone stopped using them for anything except Windows drivers and the manufacturing of them (both drives and disks) went to low-cost areas and the quality went down the tubes. IRQ issues were a problem with DOS and Windows machines with ISA cards; before that on things like C=64s, there was no such thing. Security wasn't a problem back then, because no one was connected to a network; the best they had was telephone modems to connect to Compu$erve or BBSes. Viruses started becoming a real problem when everyone moved to DOS and downloaded stuff from BBSes. Back in the Apple ][ and C=64 days, security was unnecessary. Even over on the Internet-connected UNIX side (something mainly only used by college people, not by people with C=64s), security didn't become a big issue until Morris's worm in 1988.
As for CLI taking longer to learn, perhaps, but I remember office secretaries using DOS just fine, unlike these days where everyone has no clue what to do with a command line and is terrified of it. They might not have done really advanced stuff, but learning a few DOS commands like COPY and MOVE and DEL really isn't that hard for someone with half a brain.
As for "standardization", I don't know where you get that idea. Tons of people are having all kinds of problems with their Windows software not working on Windows 10, older peripherals not working on Win10, etc. How long did it finally take us to have some standardization on the web, after dealing with IE6 for so long? We didn't have these problems back in the text-only days. And again, over on the UNIX side, they had much better attempts at standardization with the X protocol, which allowed remote GUI access between completely different UNIX OSes, in the 80s. It took ages for anything similar to arrive on Windows machines.