[Bluestein]

Good call :)

"8 bit 'looks' and hardware constitutes - and 'looks like' - some optimum as far as computing is concerned"

... so sufficiently advanced systems will look like it to interface with us as a sort of lingua franca.-

AGIs. Alien probes. The works. They will all look to us like a C64 or NES would :)

[medstrom]

It's like how you can say that VT100 emulation has an expiration date, but you can't say that about the underlying concept of some UI based on a screenful of monospaced text, which is immortal.