Mar's "atmosphere" has about a half a percent of the pressure of Earth's. The rovers do NOT get a nice helping of solar power while they hibernate for five months of martian winter.

Plucking a guitar string can teach about sound. or even stretching a vibrating rubber band. Anyway music boxes don't qualify for our discussion, they are "still current tech". There is something to observe with the CD, but you'll have to crack out the microscope

"as evidenced by its use" No, people wasting time and money doing inefficient things proves nothing other than silliness. There are better ways for a company to deal with documents than typewriters, carbon paper, triplicate forms, printed office memos, etc.

But what happens when you need a revised document? type over? ocr and then into word processor? you're just being silly with that typewriter. get with the times.

I use a company Apple laptop, must say it's very solid and robust compared to other leading laptop brands, and I sure appreciate having BSD on there as opposed to the other alternative my employer would have handed me, a windows thing. Don't have to worry about driver configuration issues either, the hardware designed for an OS and driver set. I drive two other screens with it on my desk, nice to have three total screens that work well together. Major softwares in the business/professional world can run on it, for some things there just aren't alternatives yet in the open source world. Now at home I run GNU/Linux, on the two systems under my desk nvidia and radeon driver issues sometimes a pain. But there are things I have to do for work that just can't run on that platform, so I have to fire up windows 7 under vmware workstation. ew.

not valid at all, the claim was about "computer systems" not PC HP huge in mid range systems from early 70s onward

Everyone here is so desktop-computer focused. HP indeed has a long tradition as a computer company. In 1972 they introduced the HP 3000 minicomputer line, which had a 31 year run until 2003. Its MPE operating system is time sharing. These machines are still running at manufacturing plants, office management companies, and local insurance companies. In 2012 Stromas made an emulator for x86, and HP sells an "HPA/3000" license to run MPE on it.

there's only one reason left to use those silly things, and that's just because a business is still using another unnecessary obsolete technology when superior alternative has been around for decades now.

I haven't needed a typewriter at work since circa 1990. a friend and I came up with templates for all the needed forms on the word processor wares so the clack-clacking of the typewriter we used to use in our department was never heard from again.

another pointless office machine that soon needs to die off is the facsimile machine

"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.