Thats what NixSys makes, old PC's for old software
Discussion
I see that now... I am still very confused though. I would just run these legacy applications in a sandboxed VM. Unless there's an attached peripheral that won't work with VM drivers.
Cant run a VM next to a conveyor belt, which is probably like 90% of their customers, old automation hardware which dies and they cant invest millions in new hardware because the PC died.
why can't you? these systems cost $850 for a Pentium III with 1GB of RAM. You could build a low cost and powerful machine with modern components and have it run a VM just fine. The only issue, IMO, would be finding a motherboard with parallel or serial ports?
as I said in another comment, I used to do this for a containment solutions company. i soldered the cables from their custom machine to serial, then built a robust tiny PC, at the time it ran Windows 7, and put their legacy application on VM running Windows 3.11/DOS.
We had a customer that we tried to run 98se on a VM but for some unknown reason it didn't work no matter what we tried. We ended up having to go to an old computer junk store and bought them out of the 98 boxes.