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Comment by anarcat | Hacker News Reader

You are assuming they need help. It seems to me they are doing fine.

Whatever your thing will run on, will it still work in another 30 years? Our hardware is so flaky that everyone in the industry is depreciating at 3-5 years or less. Sure, platforms can stay the same, hardware-wise, but you'd be really lucky if you can still run the same software that you did before.

And yes, you can run an emulator, but who's going to maintain the underlying platform? Is it going to be connected to the internet and be part of the next gargantuan IoT DDOS attack.

What those guys is need is another Comodore 64, brand new. It has proven it works, why change it?

We need to take a serious look at this stuff: this is what we should be doing. Not writing yet another freaking web server, but stuff that can still be operational in 30 years.

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I wish I could upvote you twice.

This is so very true, I can't think of any device that will offer them any kind of improvement over the brand new C64 scenario.

What device that is installed today will still be working 30 years from now? Maybe some appliances without moving parts? Some raspberry PIs?

Your average church organ is expected to last 30 years, and large, representative instruments are expected to last hundreds. That's why the big ones are so low-tech. That's intentional.

We replaced our (digital) organ a couple of years ago. The previous one dated from 1992. People were surprised that we needed to replace it so quickly: I asked how many of them were still using an Amstrad word-processor from 1992.

I helped out a local church a few years ago that had an electronic pipe organ from approximately 1980. It wasn't digital at all, it was purely analog. Some of the keys didn't work any more, and others were out of tune. Basically, the way it worked is that every key had a whole circuit (with two key circuits per pluggable card) behind it which generated the tones; it was ridiculously inefficient. Over time, a bunch of the capacitors had gone out of spec, beyond the ability to use the potentiometers to compensate.

On the other hand, there's plenty people who are still using a HP calculator from the same era. There's nothing inherent to computers that forces a rapid turnover. It gets really problematic when you have capital equipment with a lifetime of decades controlled by a computer that for some reason needs replacement every five years.

Organ builders have solved the problem: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgellandschaft_Ostfriesland

The reason to get on the emulator platform is that it only needs to be something that can run an emulator and have a bit of hardware hooked up, which is nearly everything that exists today. The "nearly everything that exists today" will be easier to get a hold of, even in 30 years, than Commodore hardware.

Just recently Individual Computer released a C64 motherboard replacement that is cycle compatible with the original, with the original IO ports etc.

On top of that there are about a dozen FPGA boards with a wide variety of C64 cores that will also give you more or less (depending on version) cycle compatibility with the C64 and varous degrees of availability of ports.

I think you underestimate how long hardware compatible with these systems will be available vs. the effort that would be involved in keeping an emulated setup working across migrating hardware and OS models and ensure the hardware interface they need keeps working for each new generation.

Will it really? There are devices that refuse to setup because their activation servers went offline after a few years now.

I couldn't even setup an iPhone 5C without giving it a connection to the internet.

Not to mention that if they run it on a VM and the host crashes or becomes unusable, they lose business. It seems the C64 is robust enough for them, no need for extra layers.

"You are assuming they need help. It seems to me they are doing fine."

Are you responsible for a production deployment of any kind? "I'm doing fine until something goes wrong" is not doing fine.

Unfortunately, merely stockpiling Commodore hardware is not a great long-term plan; the failures will be correlated. Even the ones just sitting on the shelf are decaying.

"And yes, you can run an emulator, but who's going to maintain the underlying platform? Is it going to be connected to the internet and be part of the next gargantuan IoT DDOS attack."

Why would it be?

You seem to be really, really stretching for reasons why this is a bad idea.

Pretty much guaranteed that nothing someone would build for them today would last them 3 decades. That's a lost art.

There probably exist COTS things to do exactly what they use this C64 for, used by other garages. When the day comes that this thing runs out, they can always switch to one of those. That's probably a better idea than trying to get this to work in a C64 emulator, timing issues and all.

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