This isn't about saving manuals so people can keep running 80-year-old systems that are still in service.
I think it would be more correct to say that it isn't only about that. As somebody above pointed out, "technology never dies". You'd be shocked what you'll find still running out there if you look in the right places. Forget Silicon Valley for a minute... go find a manufacturing plant in the midwest or in the southeast somewhere, or even in the rust belt. A plant that makes some kind of goofy sub-assembly for producing something, where none of us have even though about that sub-assembly or would know what it was if we saw it. In that kind of place you'll still find all sorts of seemingly archaic technology... old IBM mainframes with drum hard-disk drives where the drum weighs about 50 lbs and stores 50MB of data. IBM S/36 and S/38 minicomputers, DEC PDP/11's, old VAX machines, you name it, it's out there. Heck, go check in some non-profit telephone cooperative somewhere in rural america... I'd be you'll find more of the same there. And so on, and so on...
I think it would be more correct to say that it isn't only about that. As somebody above pointed out, "technology never dies". You'd be shocked what you'll find still running out there if you look in the right places. Forget Silicon Valley for a minute... go find a manufacturing plant in the midwest or in the southeast somewhere, or even in the rust belt. A plant that makes some kind of goofy sub-assembly for producing something, where none of us have even though about that sub-assembly or would know what it was if we saw it. In that kind of place you'll still find all sorts of seemingly archaic technology... old IBM mainframes with drum hard-disk drives where the drum weighs about 50 lbs and stores 50MB of data. IBM S/36 and S/38 minicomputers, DEC PDP/11's, old VAX machines, you name it, it's out there. Heck, go check in some non-profit telephone cooperative somewhere in rural america... I'd be you'll find more of the same there. And so on, and so on...