Discretion was the sole advantage of obsolete hardware. Obsolete hardware was so bafflingly out-of-date as to be basically unpoliceable. Modern virtuality standards were far tidier, sturdier, and more sensible than the primitive, frazzled, often dangerous junk from the rest of the century. Modern data archives were astonishingly free, accessible, and open. But there were hundreds of obsolescent formats, and vast backwaters of obsolescent data, that were accessible only on machines no longer manufactured or supported. Machines of this sort could only be used by hobbyist fanatics—or by people so old that they had learned to use these machines decades ago and had never abandoned them.