[awfabian2]

I went to a good school for CS, and some of the professors did work for private industry and interesting research, and why hardware like this can seem so dated came up a few times. One professor worked doing formal verifications of hardware and such things. (for example, Toyota might want something close to formal, mathematical proof that the chips and software in their car can never cause uncontrolled acceleration.)

Basically, if you dump a lot of money into making sure something works, and works exactly as intended, as long as it does and can do the job, you don't change anything. You don't stick in one extra memory chip without redoing your formal verifications and tolerance testing, etc. Very expensive people will have to run very expensive processes to prove that even the most minor change doesn't compromise certain key properties when you can't afford for those properties to be compromised for any reason whatsoever.