We had a bright orange magic box that was connected to a beige windows 95 box that you were never allowed to turn off because nobody knew if it would survive a reboot and there was no software for the orange box for a more modern setup. Almost felt an like arcane ritual, typing in the command lines to get it to work.
Could honestly try a virtual machine or an emulator at that point. Would be worth a shot.
My workplace was still using DOS machines (386s) in 2015 to format letters. It couldn’t be emulated as the critical component was an ISA card
One of the pieces of work I worked on was diverting the data stream aimed at that letter system and translating it to go via our more modern correspondence system