Or drivers for some other much more expensive and hard to replace (possibly custom developed) widget. This is the sort of situation that leaves VAX and PDP-11 systems running in production decades after they were discontinued.

Not quite. Windows NT was initially developed for the Intel i860 CPU Architecture and ported to MIPS/i386/Alpha/PowerPC later. The codename for the i860 XR processor was "N10" or N-Ten.

I have often heard this and I just can't figure out where this whole "Visual Studio is the best IDE ever" stuff comes from or if people are serious when they say it.

I use Visual Studio every day at work. Used it for years. It is *not* the best. In fact, despite its very high price tag, I'd consider it quite basic in many areas. If you buy a copy of ReSharper things get a lot better but most of what it adds is already built into IntelliJ and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Eclipse and NetBeans.

Plus it has no real source control support built in. Just TFS. Don't get me started on TFS. I've encountered plenty of people who think its great too and I can only assume they've never used anything else (except probably SourceSafe, its predecessor and almost certainly the worst source control tool ever written. I'd sooner use RCS than trust my code to that.)

What one day came from my pile of old keyboards has now been used every day on my main computer for at least a year. It took only a few minutes of use before deciding to make the switch and I do not ever plan on switching back. At only 14 years of age my Model M should provide many more years of service. I do not know how many people here have used one, but I use one every day.