At very least there are some modernizations you could do for text legibility. Screens are bigger now, and today lines of text that run the entire width of the page are unnecessarily difficult to read. Similarly, with more screen real-estate you could pump up that font-size and line spacing a bit.

It needs a max-width somewhere. This website was not designed for 25' screens.

I've just tweaked the page with:

    body {
	    width: auto;
	    margin: 2em auto;
	    max-width: 40em;
	    font-size: large;
	    line-height: 1.4;
	    background-color: #fffff8;
    }

    * {
	    line-height: 1.4;
    }

Consumer perception, mainly. It depends on the target audience of the page. Modern consumers have come to correlate certain appearances with quality. It's not an awesome cultural development, but you're not likely to gain much traction by fighting against that momentum unless you already have an oversized influence on that readership's expectations.