Nearly every day I use a Win98 computer. Not because I enjoy the nostalgia, it's because I HAVE to for my Job. Nearly every day someone emails me photos or drawings of artwork they need engraved on something. I have several scanning/digitizing/vectorizing programs designed to convert customer artwork into vectors/toolpaths that I can "paint" for use with laser engraving, and/or for my rotary machines to follow. Coreldraw comes with a "Trace" program. To put in bluntly, it sucks. I paid hundreds of $$ for VectorMagic. Better than Corel but it too is worthless to me. What DOES work for me are the 3 versions of a long ago defunct program called CasMate. It was designed in the early '90s when vinyl sign plotters became popular. Worked great for engravers too, it would do in seconds what used to take me many minutes to hours to do with a digitizing tablet and a mouse. In 1992 I paid $10,000 for the original DOS version of CasMate and a shiny new 480 computer, with a 5-1/4" floppy drive and a whopping 140meg hard drive to run it. TO THIS DAY CasMate's digitizing routine runs circles around any newer program I've tried. The reason is simple: The program simply traces what it sees as black, and it's wonderful at it.
The catch? Each program comes with a security lock, aka dongle, that plugs into a parallel port. Seen one of those lately? -- But they won't work with just ANY parallel port, they only work in computers where DOS is/was the operating system. Win 3.whatever, 95, 98, 98se and ME ran off DOS. XP incorporated the operating system unto itself, and thru the magic of "improvement" this newfangled OS was now somehow divorced from the parallel ports. While XP is perfectly capable of running CasMate, it can't run the program because XP has no provision to "read" the parallel port. Any computer newer than ME is completely useless to run the best graphics digitizing program I've ever found.
And pretty soon, parallel and serial cable connections have followed suit. Most 10 year old computers, and even some new ones, still have a serial port, but not parallel ports.
Computer design engineers keep phasing out 'legacy' stuff that I RELY ON every day. And I'm not alone. I have 18 various CNC machines in perfect working order in my house, and only 7 of them can be run by a USB connection.
I would pay good money for a SHOP BASED computer that someone has the audacity to build with many of the newer security and actual useful improvements, MINUS all the social-media specific garbage, and using a very-similar-to-if-not-identical-to Win7 user interface, lots of memory, drive space, etc., that will run virtually ANY Windows program that EVER worked in any other PC, with a motherboard, peripherals and device connectors that would accommodate ANYTHING that has ever been plugged into a computer.
Microsoft? Dell? Anyone?