[Tor3]

> I am wondering if there is any value of having old hardware around anymore.

It's definitely useful when you write emulators.. particularly if you're writing the only one in existence (and that's not so unusual, if you're targeting a relatively obscure mini, for example). I've written two emulators/simulators, I have hardware for one of them and that'll let me figure out the missing corner cases (not documented, or poorly documented), but I don't have hardware for the other one - and there are three or four undocumented areas. I wish I had the hardware.

This is hardware I used to work on in the eighties and early nineties. One day you kind of wake up to the fact that it's all gone, from everywhere.

It's another story if you just using (already existing) emulators. But for many people it's not really the same thing. It could be the speed, the mechanics, the hands-on.. heck, I lost the interest in pinball arcade machines when they replaced the mechanical score counter with LED counters. Can't really explain it, but the magic somehow evaporated.