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You know I don't want to come across as disrespectful to my elders but in many ways I feel that this kind of nostalgia is holding open source back. One of my favorite pieces of software is GNU Make. Having read the codebase, I get the impression that its maintainer might possibly be a similar to spirit to the OP. The kind of guy who was there, during the days when computers were a lot more diverse. The kind of guy who still boots up his old Amiga every once in a while, so he can make sure GNU Make still works on the thing, even though the rest of us literally would not be able to purchase one for ourselves even if we wanted it.
It's a pleasure I respect, but it's not something I'll ever be able to understand because they're longing for platforms that got pruned from the chain of direct causality that led to our current consensus (which I'd define more as CTSS -> MULTICS/CPM -> UNIX/DOS/x86 => Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD/Android/x86/ARM).
My point is that open source projects still maintain all these #ifdefs to support these unobtainable platforms. Because open source is driven by hobbyism and passion. And people are really passionate about the computers they're not allowed to use at their jobs anymore. But all those ifdefs scare and discourage the rest of us.
For example, here's a change I recently wrote to delete all the VAX/OS2/DOS/Amiga code from GNU Make and it ended up being 201,049 lines of deletions. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/commit/10a766ebd07b7340... If you check out files like "dir.c" you see like how bad the damage is, and that's not even the long of it for directories. A lot of what I do with Cosmopolitan Libc is because it breaks my heart how in every single program's codebase we see this same pattern, and I feel like it really ought to be abstracted by the C library, since the root problem is all these projects are depending on 12 different C libraries instead of 1.
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