[kbolino]

But the hardware does expire. Computers aren't just magically "faster" than they were decades ago; they're altogether different under the hood. An immense number of abstractions have held up the image of stability but the reality is that systems with hundreds of cores, deep and wide caches, massively parallel SSDs and NICs, etc. require specialized software compared to their much simpler predecessors to be used effectively. Feature bloat is a major annoyance, and running the old software on new hardware can give the appearance of being much faster, until it locks everything up, or takes forever to download a file, or can't share access to a resource, or thinks it has run out of RAM, or chews up a whole CPU core doing nothing, etc.