Good reminder of how ephemeral things are in the software industry -- much of the software we use today will be obsolete in 15 years.
This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."
The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old.
[1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux
[2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
One wonders why they have bothered to pay for such hardware in first place.
Then I remember about Electron and Docker.
See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable.
Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same.
Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.