Introduction & A Bit of Backstory
Why on earth would someone care about an ancient operating system that runs on obsolete hardware—useless by today's standards?
Probably because it's there, maybe because it's important, but mostly because it's interesting.
I cannot put my finger on the exact moment I decided I needed to know more about RSTS/E v7 or Digital PDP-11 computers. Honestly, the decision was recent, but the interest goes way back to when I was a kid of around 9 years old. My dad dropped a comment to me around 1978 that computers were able to store programs on cassette, and that you could get a computer at home if you wanted to build one.
On tape? On a cassette? That's incredible! I had an old Philips cassette player that I carried around and recorded stuff on: Mum yelling, mates swearing, birds, traffic... you know that kind of thing. But to discover programs could live forever blew my young mind.
I had to wait until 1981 to get my hands on a secondhand 1K ZX81 to witness this miracle, but it was worth the wait. I fell into a hole which I cannot seem to get out of. Back then (it's 1981, remember), minicomputers were beautiful things. Heck, you could even sit on a Cray like a bench seat. But they were the stuff of businesses, universities, and rich people.
BUT! If you were resourceful, you could find stuff out. You could read the fancy magazines in WHSmith if you could hide at the end of the shelves. If you were good enough, you could read a whole article before being informed that, yet again, "it's not a library"—then getting in even more trouble for informing the shop assistant that the library didn't have these, or sell chocolate.
I did know that these machines were beautiful and in some magical, incredible way, many people at once could use them at the same time. Even better, multiple people could play games together.
So fast forward to today, and I have the power of the compute gods at my fingertips: multiple AIs in my pocket to answer questions and show me syntax, and a network of like-minded people in a helpful and friendly community. It's a no-brainer to dive in and get an old OS running.