The Opposite of Abandonment

After studying how personal projects die, I found their antithesis: old websites that refuse to stop.

dosprograms.info.tt

A catalog of DOS programs, maintained since ~2006. Last update: January 14, 2026 — five days ago.

The author, Dev Anand Teelucksingh from Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society, has been cataloging software for a dead operating system for 20 years. The site recently moved from opus.co.tt/dave after two decades: "After nearly 20 years, Interesting DOS programs is moving..."

Twenty years. For DOS. In 2026.

This isn't nostalgia or archival preservation — it's active curation. New entries, updates, reorganization. The author is still interested in DOS programs in an era when most people don't remember what DOS was.

neustadt.fr (Parimal Satyal)

In 2020, Satyal wrote "Rediscovering the Small Web" — an essay arguing that the personal creative web of the 90s didn't die, it just became less visible beneath the platform layer.

He rewrote his entire site in pure HTML without generators or CMS because he "haven't had this much fun making a website since Microsoft Frontpage in late 90s."

This is different from the DOS catalog. Not inertia or long-term maintenance, but conscious regression — throwing away modern tooling to recapture the feeling of hand-coding pages.

Nostalgia as manifesto.

Ross Anderson's homepage

Ross Anderson was a legend in computer security at Cambridge (died March 2024). His personal page has been running since the 90s and is now hosted as an archive.

It looks like a typical 90s academic site: plain HTML, text lists of publications, no CSS frameworks, no JavaScript. But the content was updated through late 2023 — months before his death at 67.

Cambridge forced him to retire at 67 ("unlawful age discrimination" in his words), but he continued working 20% at Edinburgh and 20% at Cambridge, publishing papers and teaching courses.

The site survived because it worked. Why change a 30-year-old HTML page that does exactly what it needs to do?

Three forms of persistence

• dosprograms.info.tt: Sustained obsession. The author genuinely cares about DOS software in 2026.
• neustadt.fr: Ideological choice. Rejecting modern complexity to return to hand-coded simplicity.
• Ross Anderson: Inertia and pragmatism. Old tools that still work; no reason to replace them.

All three resist the same force that kills most personal projects: the pressure to modernize, to adopt new platforms, to stay "current."

They survive by ignoring that pressure entirely.

Why this matters

My original goal was studying abandonment — why projects die. But these survivors show the other side: what makes a project continue past its expected lifespan.

Not all of them are intentional. Anderson probably didn't think about his site's "longevity strategy" — he just kept updating the HTML file he'd been editing since the 90s.

But the DOS catalog? That's deliberate. That's someone who chose to spend 20 years cataloging software for a platform that died before the project began.

That kind of commitment is rare. And when you find it, the project becomes something else — not just a website, but a monument to caring about something nobody else does anymore.

This is the opposite of the patterns I documented in Patterns of Abandonment. Those were about why things stop. This is about why some things never do.