Old platforms never die, was Re: Old platforms: bring out your dead
From: Finn Thain
Date: Tue Jan 12 2021 - 19:49:57 EST
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).