The year 2024 started with the sudden and sad news of the passing away of Niklaus Wirth, Turing Award winner and creator of many influential programming languages. It was hard for this author not to dive back into memories of Pascal, probably Wirth's more successful and famous creation, for the main article of this month. This will not be an obituary; after all, The Register published one that, I believe, is the perfect one. Instead, we will focus on the myriad breadcrumbs of evidence showcasing the towering legacy of Mr. Wirth.

The pages of this magazine have often orbited around the subject of retrocomputing. Take, for example, the editions about sustainability, computer museums, hardware, hobbies, gaming, operating systems, or the one about BASIC published last summer. If you pay attention, you most probably have realized how much retrocomputing has grown in popularity in the past few decades, with more and more people learning on YouTube or TikTok how to replace the batteries or leaking capacitors from the motherboards of all kinds of computers of yesteryear.

Among the oldest companies still active we can find: a few Japanese corporations founded between 500 and 800 AD, a restaurant in Austria, a French winery, an Italian bell maker, and quite a few hotels scattered all over the Northern Hemisphere. Through a combination of opportunism, luck, corruption, monopoly, perseverance, talent, and ingenuity, these businesses have been able to survive the inevitable chaos of the markets where they operate; in some incredible cases, for longer than a whole millennium.