Emulators are nice to have... but they do lack the charm of the real thing. I think I could get access to a zSeries per VM but... I don't have a good practical reason to do so. And when it comes to emotional reasons remote VM or emulators won't do. Wind machines with blinking, chirping 15k disks or (even better) spinning tape. Dot-matrix printes close to meldown emitting the aroma of freshly heated ink spitting out the contents of an entire file due to a console error.
A few years ago the german army had some nice jobs for people proficient in cobol. Some devices stay in service for decades and at some point most of the people who know how to maintain them retire. Even though some operating systems and languages disappear they tend to be very influential. Linux is its own thing but it would be nowhere near what it is today without contributions from other OSes. SGI and SUN in particular ported many things from IRIX and Solaris to the linux world. The heretic in me still wonders about a SGI Octane case mod. Of course based on a defunct Octane.
Did you manage to capture a few of those IBM Model M clones with DEC branding for your own while working there? clappetty clap
Talking firmware: Cars. Dozens of microcontrollers shipped by various suppliers and tied together using CAN. Enter the engineers "Wireless pressure sensors for the tires would be nice" So far so good. But it translates to "We have some little feature that provides a few small benefits sometimes. We would like wireless access to the same bus that all these obscure makeshift devices are coupled to" Along comes the EU "Starting from next year all new cars must have a GSM modem".
Bad firmware is one thing: Bad firmware with wireless communication is another. Some nuclear powerplants run on software that would suite your appetite for cheese in terms of holes but they are not available for remote access. The combination will lead to very big trouble.
I was not referring to Linux/BSD reminding me of a schism. It was more the Linux-world that seems to be occupied with its own ideological battles sometimes. There is some tension between Linux and BSD but it seems to be more limited. Maybe I am mistaken about that. When it comes to BSD my pragmatic interest is security and therefore OpenBSD. Yet without open firmware it was incomplete. Build on top of Intels management engine whatever you want, it will always by default have some doors outside of your control.
