Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Old systems are surprisingly understandable after a few hours' research and fooling around. This is why I say old computers never die - their owners do! Old systems have lots of technology to engage the hacker mind. By the way, my favourite emulator is Oriculator, which emulates the Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat/Pravetz 8-bit machines that never had much of a chance in the 80's .. just look at this beautiful code, for exam…
I wonder why it's possible to get "better" programs for old hardware now. Is it because the field of CS has advanced further, which means that we can apply modern ideas and algorithms? Or is it because we can cheat and have a toolchain running on vastly superior hardware, which enables us to use it in ways that would have been too time-consuming to develop back in the day?
The edit-compile-test cycle is near instant and debugging from an emulator is a lot easier than debugging on the real hardware.