Old 8-bit systems still run many businesses just fine.
I'd rather run some critical part of my business on an Apple II with software that's had 30 years to eliminate every last bug than some IoT piece of crap.
A couple years ago I shut down Chicago's premier burger joint for an hour because I tried to pay with cash. Their IoT cash register locked itself and their fancy iPad based POS system refused to take any new orders. They were trying to figure out who to call in SF, had to @ them on Twitter for support.
It was ridiculous. Normalize running your business on small computer systems.
Running a business on an Apple II is at least as silly as running it on an
iPad since any kind of hardware failure is going to be harder to quickly resolve (unless you’re the kind of business that has electrical engineers to hand. But even then, it’s still not as quick as buying a new stick of RAM from the local computer store).
There is a sane middle ground between your experience and running CP/M on a 40 year old computer.
> software that's had 30 years to eliminate every last bug
Bugs can exist in hardware too. Plus I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that every last software bug would be fixed. For starters any bug fixes in that time could introduce new bugs. And there are often bugs that are time specific (like epoch overflows).
