[thisgoodlife]

If I were the customer, I’d reject your proposal too. The old software has been working fine for 40 years, why would I want to find someone to rewrite it?

[jandrese]

In this case it would be to prepare for the inevitable death of the last machine in the office that can actually run it.

[icedchai]

With emulation, it can run forever.

[squarefoot]

And faster, safer and future proof. I wouldn't be surprised at all if most 30+ years old software ran better on modern machines under a VM than say on 15 years old hardware without emulation.

[josephg]

Faster, yes. But not all of the things modern software does is pointless overhead. For anything networked, modern crypto is a must have if you’re going to interoperate with other devices. And I wouldn’t trust a windows 95 virtual machine connected directly to my corporate network.

[squarefoot]

I didn't try, but firewalling the VM shouldn't be hard since it talks through a virtual dedicated interface. Also, one can isolate it from the network and use only shared directories with the host so it can read and write files without going online.

[bombcar]

The death of the user is more likely than the death of the ability to run the spreadsheet; updating can wait until that time if necessary.