yeah that’s what I’m talking about it’s nice to be able to still run a windows 95 or OG redhat 6 distro on period hardware if nothing else for learning and museum.
people still do it today in the retro space all the time and it’s a hell of a lot harder to do on windows and Mac than Linux since every kernel is still archived. I mean am I that old to remember the 2.6 split. it’s not the same thing since that was maintained but it doesn’t mean someone in the retro space couldn’t do a back port if needed.
I was at VCF this year and people were still writing new code for PDP11s. it may not be productive in a work sense but preserving computing history is something of value and not ewaste.