https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Also, the people who originally developed X were brillian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Also, the people who originally developed X were brilliant and X was brilliant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias In general: - Brilliant people in the eighties will still write better code than typical people in the 2020s. - Ditto for brilliant code. A lot of this is actually pretty random. Sometimes an idiot will architect something great by accident, and vice-versa. - Most things written in the eighties still used are really, really good in some way (or they would have been replaced many times over). So most attempts to replace classic technologies end up with dramatically inferior replacements. Classic Unix was really, really good. It survived not because OSes in the sixties and seventies were any good (most weren't), but because if you build many of them, one will turn out great. I'm not sure there's much more than that.