[trashtester]

.... until the end of the human race as we know it.

I think this is the critical part. If humanity (as we know it) only lasts 10 more years, then sure x86 will still be around somewhere.

If we last a million years, it will probably be gone long before that. Even in a thousand years it's probably gone a long time ago.

[postmodest]

I'm reminded of the Vernor Vinge novel where a character hacking some fleet's automation hundreds of thousands of years in the future casually mentions that the tech stack is so old that the system time stamp is still the Unix Epoch

“And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

[skywal_l]

Part of the "Fire Upon the Deep" series of novels (that particular reference is from the "A Deepness in the Sky").

[tetha]

I mean a thousand years are very hard to imagine, and how many changes there are.

But the cynical operator in my head could just laugh. We as a tech community are still running MS-DOS productively. Just wait, someone will run the door controls of our first space ships on some x86 chip. Or some similar system you just need, but that never gets time to be updated properly. Just wait, the new cruise liner spaceship of the milky way republic is going to run some x86 emulator for their window control.