> perhaps with fixes and improvements. in my experience, if there's no will or budget for a rewrite, it gets virtualized, locked away behind a firewall/corpora

> perhaps with fixes and improvements. in my experience, if there's no will or budget for a rewrite, it gets virtualized, locked away behind a firewall/corporate network with a restricted set of users, and will basically run forever as long as the ISA and virtual storage is supported by emulation and the business process still exists and is able to support the infra/people involved. think of it like a zero coupon 100 year bond in technical debt issuance underwritten by the central bank (corporate hq). and highly liquid in the sense that a virtual image is easy to move around. the good part is it just gets faster and takes up less % resources as hardware improves, and forever-bugs are usually worked around and documented by the people pushing the buttons.