Surely some of it is just nostalgia for a "simpler" time, but I think there is a legitimate reason to preserve and celebrate these older systems, too.
It's essentially impossible for a single person to build something as complex as a modern PC "from scratch", or indeed to build an operating system that compares to Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
These old microcomputer systems are simple enough for one person or a small team to understand and build, and they are/were capable of doing "useful work", too, and not so overly-abstracted like some "teaching systems" are.
I think that for me, part of the point of digging into something like the p-System is to show some of the brilliant (and stupid) ideas that went into building something as ambitious as a "universal operating system" in the mid-1970s.
It's essentially impossible for a single person to build something as complex as a modern PC "from scratch", or indeed to build an operating system that compares to Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
These old microcomputer systems are simple enough for one person or a small team to understand and build, and they are/were capable of doing "useful work", too, and not so overly-abstracted like some "teaching systems" are.
I think that for me, part of the point of digging into something like the p-System is to show some of the brilliant (and stupid) ideas that went into building something as ambitious as a "universal operating system" in the mid-1970s.