"What happened to C&A?"
That's probably the biggest question I have after the finale, but it also probably has the easiest answer.
C&A were a computer software company from the 90s, they probably just went bankrupt after the dot com bubble burst.
Now who's keeping the power on is a question we'll probably never get the answer to.
I kid, I kid. I'm honestly not too bothered by not having an answer to thar question. Mainly because, who could answer it?
Most of the cast are just people who wandered in, they didn't even know who C&A were until Kinger told them. And as far as we know Kinger was just a regular employee. One who was part of a big project sure, but nothing indicates he was a founder or higher up.
So for me at least, it doesn't really matter how the power is still on. Maybe a friend of Scratch's is keeping the power on thinking his digital consciousness is still there. Maybe the computer is hooked to a power source that's not part of the building it's in. Who can really say?
I mean also just because it was from the 90’s doesn’t mean it would have failed, after all Adobe formed in 82 and they’re doing really well. I mean just considering how good Caine was C&A would likely be the industry leaders in AI.
Also I don’t think it was stated that C&A was just a software company but may be a more general tech company (or even a mega corp that works across many industries). The fact that Scratch was able to build a brain scanner at least indicates that C&A had some hardware segment (and likely an R&D department that Scratch could get the prototype parts) and as such would be unlikely to have collapsed in the dotcom bubble.
As for how TADC is still running, sooooo many companies just have crazy old legacy systems that they just can’t shut down or easily replace so they just leave it running on a server rack. Heck it’s also possible they hooked that old system to their network and TADC is dynamic and automatically moves itself to newer systems or even spreads the processing power across multiple systems using a cluster setup.
TADC may have also become a load bearing system across C&A’s infrastructure and trying to remove it just breaks C&A’s systems so they just let it keep running sort of like how if you delete Goku from GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-‘s code the whole game breaks despite Goku not being a playable character and instead from a the Dragon Ball game the studio previously made.
I mean it can also be explained like you said that someone either knows their mindfiles exist or someone learned what Scratch created (could even be Grant after the brain scan) and trusts that Scratch succeeded and wants to keep the scans alive.
