At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.
Madness string 24253
Maybe it just died out years before 2001 and then someone made fuss in their enterprise support about an old support contract not having an end date, so they explicitly terminated them all at once. It's not like there was going to be a security patch after 20 years of inactivity. How would they even release it? Offer floppy by mail for a limited time?