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Sure, but your ability to run said bits (the scaffolding, if you will humor an architectural analogy) certainly decays over time, whether through hardware incompatibility, software changes, or new abstractions becoming the norm. The result is no different than the code itself decaying.

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Still, but in practise you can adapt in a mediocre way to new scaffolding by copying large parts. That way you introduce new bugs, which is part the problem we're talking about, but you kept it alive for another couple of years by relatively low effort.

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