It's comforting to know others are interested in "retrocomputing". For some reason I like slow old computers too. (Not being sarcastic here at all)

It's preserving our history. We can learn a lot from what we already did.

Besides, when the machines take over, they may want to spare those who respected them ;-)

I hope they feed me and keep my cage clean.

I've got a soft spot for the Z80 and they were considered out of date by the time I was born. A few years ago I found a great book on how to build a simple microcomputer based on the Z80. I learned a ton working through that book and that little chip brought me a lot of joy. I've still got a couple Z80s in my part drawer... you know... just in case...

Z80 was only out of date when you were born if you're not TI.

Same. Sometimes they are faster and more productive, despite being older.

It makes me sad from a retrocomputing standpoint as well. I have a sun386i in storage that I always said I would port linux to one day. Oh well...

I can't blame them for wanting to drop it though, not only do you not have the full range of atomic operations, but also the MMU doesn't respect the WP bit from kernelspace which means special code in copy_to_user()

I wonder how long they will keep the 486SX alive now that it's the last one that requires 387 emulation.

> I would port linux to one day. Oh well...

You've still got all the old kernels that do support it. And Debian certainly has historical archives (http://www.debian.org/distrib/archive) and I'm sure other distros do too, if you want all the other linux architecture.