On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 01:26:15PM -0500, Corey Osgood wrote:
Supporting old hardware of course has an academical value ;)
Not purely academical! There are people out there who can/will use such hardware for cheap (home) servers and other stuff.
Also, there are several other reasons why support for old hardware is a good thing in general, for example to get more people to use LinuxBIOS (it's easier to use old hardware for testing and risk bricking it, than using your new and shiny work machine).
I'd argue that the academic value is minimal without the hardware to actually test it on. It's not actually all that hard to write a port that compiles and looks valid. It's much harder to make one that actually works.
Agreed. However, the good thing about old hardware is that it can be had very cheap from eBay and similar sources, so it's not that much of a problem...
Uwe.