There's no way to know how long it'll last. I offer the following observations:
- Not everyone interested in retro platforms is in it for the nostalgia, some weren't alive when the they were new.
- Old computers have the great advantage of simplicity. You can comprehend everything that goes on in a Commodore 64.
- Since they're no longer economically viable as products (in general), people are a lot less condemning about software distribution. I mean, I outright tell people on the itch.io purchase page that they should use Loadstar wherever they can get it! Fender and Jeff didn't have that luxury when it was paying their bills, which is why most issues have a stern, ancient warning on them about software piracy.
- There is also a sense that, as computers have radically gained in power and memory, that this power has largely not come to serve the machines' owners. It might make it easier to make, but not more useful or easier to use. Microsoft Word, for instance is not substantively more powerful now than it was in 1999. Where has all those decades of effort gone? What do you really get for your (spits) subscription fee these days? Essentially, only that the old versions no longer work on current-day Windows. But what it is now is more proprietary. They stuck with their abominable "Ribbon" interface, which rejects many of the tenets of GUIs established at Xerox PARC and the early Mac and Windows, purely because getting trained to use it produces knowledge that only applies to Microsoft products. Apple themselves have gone with making their interface fancier too, instead of more immediately readable and usable.
- And yet, despite supposedly being easier to develop for, is it really? I feel capable of writing a program in C for a retro platform; I don't feel so capable on current-day Windows. I think this is actually the secret lesson of Claude and other generative AI coding tools: it's gotten so complex and obtuse that people who haven't been carefully trained for current programming practices are largely lost, and it gives people a way through it all, even if it's horribly wasteful, both in terms of lines of code and resource consumption, to use it.
