There are many geeks that revel in maintaining old hardware.
IMO there will always be a way to read old media. And once it is transferred to more stable media and backed up multiple times it is essentially eternal.
What is really sad is all the old 35mm silent films on nitrate stock that have disintegrated :-(
The Library of Congress required that films be submitted as paper copies..each frame on a strip of photo paper. In many instances old films have been painstakingly restored from these paper copies.
“What is really sad is all the old 35mm silent films on nitrate stock that have disintegrated”
I read something like 3/4 from the silent era are gone.
Occasionally they find copies of movies from private collections supposedly lost up until then.