In article ,
wrote:

Emulators, my good man! You can find them for nearly any system. There
are plenty of good Apple II emulators out there, good enough to run
pretty much any software made for them. There are even emulators for old
DOS machines that will run in Windows that will do a much better job of
running old software than Windows itself will: check out DOSBox for that
one.

RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, VMS...

PDP-6, PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX...

That's just one company.

How about a GE 150, Burroughs B2500, Honeywell H316, SDS 900?

CPU's, OS's and their libraries go obsolete and become unsupportable.

The software is on EBCDIC punch cards, got an emualtor to read those?

Many of your systems do have emulators or simulators available, in fact.
(This page has a whole bunch: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/) True
enough that some don't, as far as I could find with a cursory search.
But it took a *very* long time for that to happen, and none of them had
anything like the ubiquity of the Microsoft platform. I would fully
expect Windows software to be usable until the very end of time. People
might not care about writing emulators for such hardware, but Intel x86
emulators and Windows API translation layers will probably be maintained
forever.

Even if they're not, it's going to take decades at the least before a
new copy MSFS stops being usable.

I have to say, while MX is the king of disputing anything and everything
just because he can, a lot of the people who reply to him aren't much
better. Perhaps when he said that "Software doesn't wear out" he failed
to apply the proper caveats and qualifiers to this statement, but his
overall *point*, that MSFS still works and will still works even though
it's no longer being developed, was entirely sound, and really didn't
merit an argument.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon