"sane" has no meaning, that's just opinion. 1.5 million US citizens commute to work ea on a train and the fact is USA is expanding that. Ridership increasing year by year where I live, I've joined the party and been riding an electric train to work for 18 months now....

but welding, soldering, brazing, those are still current skills used in current technology. just as mixing and pouring concrete it's still how many things are made.

a machine to print on paper by mechanically striking metal blocks on paper through ribbon is relevant? no, it is not. typewriter has no relevance, persistence of most its key layout (which actually has been altered on electronic keyboards) doesn't imply typewriter as device is relevant any more

nonsense. hunting uses very little ammo, decades of supply can fit in a box in a closet. no need to smelt iron, plenty of otherwise useless iron (and many other metal) things will by lying around after infrastructure collapse. somehow humans managed the growing of food without technology more complicated than tool to dig, for millenia. I can do it, have done it.

they can see obsolete things at museums, like the cylindrical wax records I saw and and heard demonstrated. Any basic scientific principles can be taught with current technology, no need to forage for old junk or simulate such. Horse carriages and buggy whips, scanning CRT with one color of luminecent coating, telegraph key sending dots and dashes? They're not coming back, even were global economy to collapse for decades we'd not go back, we'd know better ways once recovery was possible.

USA would be worst place possible for hosting project with focus of openbsd, that's a country that claimed encryption was a munition in the past, and still restricts it now. Modernizing? some platforms don't have any current system to modernize to, it's a question of getting used systems. the openbsd project does have a list of desired donation equipment: http://www.openbsd.org/want.ht...

Two of openbsd newer supported architectures are octeon MIPS64 and beagle ARMV7.

Don't know why you seem to imply embedded space is different than openbsd space. You do realize openbsd is used in the embedded space, even in some commercial elevator controllers (and plenty of other embedded system)? Some of their ports are for embedded devices

Still plenty of 64 bit sparc around, used for more than Oracle if we're just talking major uses. MRP, EPR, statistics packages, project management/scheduling, engineering, insurance all still markets for that iron. note #4 supercomputer in the world is sparc based. so still around and still relevant for things other than oracle. As for what openbsd will support, all the way up to Fujitsu Sparc64-VII with the 64 bit port.

Itanium not my favorite chip, but sales of servers based on it still over 4 billion USD a year. FreeBSD, Linux support some of those and NetBSD has port in the works. not an OpenBSD port but you seemed to think it was "dead". not yet, and intel will make new models until 2020 at least as per contract.

sure it's the developers hobby, but their wares are everywhere, from elevator controllers to routers to printers to servers.

Are you sure it's not relevant to you? Softwares from the OpenBSD project are in commercial controllers and appliances, in Linux distributions, in Mac OSX....

Similarly, 1 little endian - x64 - and 1 big endian - say current SPARC - should be adequate No, there are also alignment issue variations, not just endian ones. Current Sparc is bi-endian, by the way. You aren't into OS development or systems programming, I take it.

They have found emulators aren't perfect. They'd be in the emulator debugging business. And the devs who do alternative architecture for openbsd are familiar with various pipular emulators as those of us who follow obsd newsgroups know. Those project machines get heavy use for test/build