Every dollar spent for a museum piece could have gone to education and healthcare. If we want to spend millions of the public’s dollars caring for an obsolete piece, we are stripping away dollars that could have gone to crumbling roads, hospitals, or public school classrooms. Leave the floppy disks and dial-up modems to real collectors, don’t pass on the financial burden of maintaining them to the public.

You argue that we must copy the data from that 1970s NASA computer you argued about, but why could we not just copy the data down in a device that exists in the present? We should focus on funding the future rather than the past. Also, you are suffering from a scoping glitch. You want us to look at a single Apple I. But 'obsolete technology' means millions of lines of decaying COBOL code, obsolete government databases, outdated analog broadcasting towers, and tons of toxic e-waste. Maintaining compatibility, climate control, and specialised labor for a collapsing tech ecosystem is not 'pocket change’. It’s a compounding, infinite financial sinkhole. Your library analogy is also structurally flawed. Information in a book is universally accessible. Obsolete hardware requires an entire ecosystem of dead dependencies to function. We do not need to spend public funds maintaining a toxic, massive 1970s mainframe when the data and blueprints can be digitally archived at near-zero cost. You’re wasting money preserving the heavy plastic and metal shell, not the knowledge.

Firstly, let me redefine what obsolete technology is. It is not something that is just old. Obsolete means that something is completely out of date, no longer manufactured, and replacement parts and knowledge about it is scarce. Once an obsolete material breaks, it becomes much harder to fix, since knowledge on that machine has reduced. This is dangerous if a water treatment plant like the one you mentioned, fails and breaks, and becomes very hard to fix. This proves an obsolete system isn’t cheap to fix, it requires paying an unstable premium to custom-manufacture dead parts and hire rare specialists.

You tried to defend the Bendix G-15 by claiming it is too expensive to update. But they completely ignored the catastrophic risk metrics. Leaving public water infrastructure on a 70-year-old machine is an invitation to systemic failure. Furthermore, your 'museum curation' defence completely collapsed. You couldn't explain how a scalable public policy could selectively fund a 'few dozen' machines without succumbing to thousands of competing historical tech claims. We preserve universal information digitally at near-zero cost, we protect public infrastructure by upgrading it, and we leave heavy hardware to the private sector.

On fiscal optimisation, you failed to provide a scalable framework for public funding, shrinking your case down to a 'few dozen' machines. Our model is mathematically superior, using zero-cost regulatory incentives to let private collectors handle physical curation while archiving essential data digitally.