[kbenson]

> I sympathize with your skepticism but I think 1968 is so quantitatively and qualitatively different that it's not a very helpful comparison.

It's sort of like automobiles in 1968 advertising how they are made with care and detail so they'll last, and made to be easy to work on so you can expect them to actually have people (or yourself) that know how to fix them decades later. People could easily come out and say most of what made a car in 1918 was very different to then, all the way down to the tires themselves. Industries that have had multiple decades of general use mature quite a bit, and people don't like to throw away stuff that works (or that they're fond of). We'll still have computers capable of running a von neumann architecture in 50 years, whether through hardware or software, and that's assuming we can't just port/compile to newer systems if they aren't as extreme of departures.

I still occasionally play computer games written in the 1980's, generally through dosbox or something similar. I think the most likely reason we have to lose access to running this software is if we lose access to running all software, in which case nobody will really care (not that I think that's remotely likely, just that it's the most likely scenario where that holds).