To further this depressing story, even if you were to save a room full of old computers to run the actual software on, in time they would break down and the integrated circuits inside would be no longer available for repair, assuming that you were able to secure copies of the proprietary hardware manuals that would be needed to maintain the systems...

Jerome Fine replies: I suggest that the intent was to be able to use current hardware with the old software - at some time in the future. The difficulty is that so little information was made available that no estimate is possible. As for the suggestions I have seen in respect of using an emulator, I think that even one example is sufficient. I currently use Ersatz-11 to run software that is more than a decade old. The range is from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. While the former is unusual, just this week I tested some software in response to a question on this list. The release date of the operating system was November 20th, 1975. The hardware I am using is a 750 MHz Pentium III with 768 MBytes of memory and 3 * 40 GByte EIDE ATA 100 hard disk drives. In 1975, that operating system would have been running on a CPU with a speed of between 0.1 and 0.5 MHz and the memory would have likely been around 16 KBytes with 2.5 MByte removable hard disk drives. Yet 29 years later, it can still be run and I fully hope that it will still be possible in another 29 years. As one example of a much more versatile emulator, SIMH handles up to a dozen different hardware systems. I realize that probably over 95% of this list is more inclined to hardware and likes to hear the fans and see the lights blink, but eventually in 200 years, that hardware will no longer exist. BUT, I fully expect that the software will still run in some form even if multiple emulators are required. There is just far too much software out there that will still be running even if just a small fraction of the people use emulators. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.