Old platforms never die, was Re: Old platforms: bring out your dead

[Finn Thain <fthain@telegraphics.com.au>]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2021, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> 
> There has to be a healthy balance between hobbyist and commercial use.
> 

Yes, both of those, and everything in-between, including for-profit 
businesses that serve mostly hobbyists. Also start-up companies that may 
never be commercially viable (which is most of them).

And don't forget government and non-government organisations, 
not-for-profit organisations, charities, etc.

> I understand that from a commercial point of view, it doesn't make much 
> sense to run Linux on a 30-year-old computer.

It ain't necessarily so. I would be surprised if there are no Linux VMs 
running on old corporate mainframes right now. But the age of the hardware 
is largely irrelevant.

If you're a museum interested in cultural artifacts from decades past, or 
if you're a business doing data recovery, you're going to need to operate 
those platforms.

Once removed from mainline Linux, a port becomes basically frozen, and may 
not be compatible with future emulators, which are a moving target. I say 
that because last year I fixed bugs in Linux/m68k that made it incomatible 
with recent QEMU releases (it was only compatible with old QEMU releases).