CP/M ... I had not expected that hardware from this time would still work!

At work, there is still an ancient CP/M system running in a production environment, controlling a very special measurement device. The people working with it are quite happy with the system. The CP/M machine may be a little bit slow, but the measurement device is so much slower that it does not matter at all.

The real advantage of that CP/M system is that it is build from components that do not need sophisticated cooling equipment. It doesn't even need a fan. And because the mesurement device once was worth its weight in gold (more or less ;-) ), the price for the computer was nearly irrelevant. So it was built from durable, high quality components, oversized and better than initially needed, lasting for a few decades.

Alexander

What makes you think the hardware wouldn't work? If you look after your gear, it doesn't just randomly break. Most of what I did for fifteen years on that maintenance contract was carefully taking the machine apart and cleaning it once a year - and boy did it get filthy from sitting in a barn running a bunch of industrial equipment.

Although I did do some programming on it in the past decade. Once. That was ... "interesting".