[wazoox]

You completely missed the point. It's not about living as in 1978, it's about _not throwing away_ accumulated knowledge. What use is my CP/M knowledge nowadays? None at all. What use is the knowledge I could have of '78 Bourne shell, pipes, signals, vi, ed, awk, grep, man? Not only useful, but still of daily use.

[pjmlp]

Cars from last century still take me from A to B. It doesn't mean I want to drive one.

[wazoox]

New cars have almost exactly the same interface as cars from the 50s or even older ones. People having learned to drive at any time since WWII can drive any brand new car, and nobody proposed seriously that we switch to a joystick or a brain interface.

Similarly, though the underlying hardware and code share basically nothing with Unixen of yore, old knowledge is still useful on modern Linux. This commonality of interface is more important than inner workings.

By the way the most expensive cars by far (therefore arguably the most desirable) are old to very old. A Ferrari 250 GTO is way more valuable than any new car. IIRC the most expensive car ever is a 1929 Bugatti Royale, and even you can drive it.