Not exactly what I was thinking of, because that's more on a local system than at web scale. Something else, I'm sure it's related though, kinda like a crowd crush?
What's the term for when a failing service causes the users of said service to use it more to complain about it failing? Because it sure seems like that's happening to some extent.
Assuming the computer talks over a standard protocol like serial or parallel, I don't see how it wouldn't be fairly straightforward to move it to a newer machine. Might even be able to run it on a virtual machine for better compatibility.
I had a coworker that I tried to help out, but he barely knew some common programming terms like what a type was, or how he had to declare something beforehand in order to use it. We never really found out why he didn't know these things because he was so softspoken and shut down at any attempt to understand why he was having trouble. I don't talk to him much anymore due to some team restructuring, but other coworkers still see the same so I don't know if he can be helped honestly.
The only reason I made a blog and a post was because it was something to learn with and get some of that sweet sweet Hacker News front page traffic. It did work by the way.