I remember working in the games industry in the 90s and early 2000s; getting a game past Sony testing was so fricking difficult, but it was because once that black disc was cut, there was no way to get an update. You had to be on the money, first release.

> did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time

This is because the we have these periodic influxes of scammers into the IT the industry, with their empty promises and trust me bro culture.

As a buddy in construction used to say, concrete erasers are expensive.

Exactly!

How many updates did one apply to Windows 3.0 and Word in those days??

Sure, there might have been a “hotfix” available for download over a long distance BBS, but virtually nobody would have ever done so (even if they were lucky enough to have a modem). Maybe large companies applied such when impacted.

Even in the Windows XP days, I think windowsupdate.com was still a manually triggered process…

For a while, bundled drivers were a steaming pile of crap in quality and several generations of Windows suffered greatly until Microsoft got vendors in line and updates became common.

> Your stuff was in boxes on shelves...

Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.

Software has always been a lot more diverse than just consumer goods. Why is that your only evidence of how you think software projects are managed?

Do you work in this field or are you just reading that? I’ve been out of the game for over five years now, but as far as I can tell from people I know still in that world, if you’re going to make more than like … 3 of a part, casting is going to be much cheaper. And while you can do some prototyping on 3d prints, the nature of the material winds up different from a cast part.

That's totally untrue. You clearly do not have any experience designing, building, manufacturing, testing, and certifying either cast metal or PBF parts. BTW, PBF is powerbed fusion and it is how you make 3D printed metal parts. FDM is a plastic manufacturing process and has nothing at all to do with replacing metal castings.

For a certain aircraft part that I designed, that measured approximately 16"x8"x10", if you needed up to 12 of them it was cheapest to 3D print them using powerbed fusion from AlSi10Mg, but with a 25% weight penalty due to the lower mechanical properties of 3D printed aluminum compared to cast. If you needed between 12 and 50 of them, it was cheapest to use 3D printing to make a wax preform then use the preform to make a traditional metal investment casting from A356. For more than 50 of them, it was cheapest to invest in permanent closed die tooling.

Other than for prototyping and extremely low volume production, additive has been a total flop for real-world manufacturing, and has not at all lived up to any of it's lofty promises.