[segfaultbuserr]

> In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy [...] The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte

You have a good point to make, but the argument you've employed is bad. When you said,

> In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched.

You've mixed up reliability with understandably & maintainability. In an uptime competition, a retrocomputer will lose the game to many modern computers, it's almost guaranteed. But it's not the point. The point is what happens after it's down. If it's a retrocomputer, it's possible for a single person to understand every aspect of the computer and to perform troubleshooting down to the component level. It's also easy for a single hobbyist to build one's own computer using the 6502 chip. But it's usually impractical or impossible on modern hardware. My personal understanding on the thesis of the talk is that modern computers have much less understandably & maintainability than retrocomputers, and this, in the long term, makes the civilization as a whole, less reliable. It's not a question of how durable we can make a single computer to be.

You can make a better argument if you stop saying how reliable retrocomputers are and focusing on understandably and complexity.

[ziaddotcom]

I don't make the argument that they were more reliable now or then than today's PC, they almost weren't and aren't. The problem is how we got more reliable pcs today is in the context of people who had access to both. Some generation in the future won't have access to living human beings for the day the first electronic computer came into existence as we ourselves have access to now.

Notice I said "even if left untouched." Perhaps that was too charitable, as these retropcs, without memory protection, would often crash if metaphorically "touched." It would happen often with productivity apps, much less so with games. As time has gone on with pcs, this seems to have flipped, a fair trade for the time being.

[segfaultbuserr]

Hmm, so your argument was not reliability of retrocomputers in paticular, but more generally, "how the hardware worked" (and some just happened to be reliable enough for many people), and all these things shaped the understanding of the next generation of innovators who invented our PCs. Thus it's important to preserve the hardware as a key of understanding how we get here from there, because there will be no living witness for the future generation - and this is your actual point.

I think I now understand your argument now.

[ziaddotcom]

Yes you grokked my point quite well. I wrote a long rant about how I've never had access to Amiga hardware, but I think I owe your pithiness some pithiness in return.