I’ll hazard some guesses, since no one has replied.
- Big fish small pond. Because so few people are tackling problems like this, it’s much easier to get noticed and appreciated.
- Nostalgia. I think most people have a soft spot for the computers they grew up with. For me, it’s the TI-99/4A that I learned how to program on.
- Technical challenge. Making a decades-obsolete computer work with the modern world is not trivial.
>25 years ago I worked for BBN, and they had a warehouse of old equipment, including the IMPs that made Arpanet work, a pallet of early Macs, etc. I grabbed a hard drive to use with a routing project; it had 1GB of disk, and was the size of two rack units. Working with very old computers can be fascinating as well as frustrating.
- Big fish small pond. Because so few people are tackling problems like this, it’s much easier to get noticed and appreciated.
- Nostalgia. I think most people have a soft spot for the computers they grew up with. For me, it’s the TI-99/4A that I learned how to program on.
- Technical challenge. Making a decades-obsolete computer work with the modern world is not trivial.
>25 years ago I worked for BBN, and they had a warehouse of old equipment, including the IMPs that made Arpanet work, a pallet of early Macs, etc. I grabbed a hard drive to use with a routing project; it had 1GB of disk, and was the size of two rack units. Working with very old computers can be fascinating as well as frustrating.