[usrn]

Software rots man. It can be really hard to run some open source software from the 80s and 90s. This is actually one of the big arguments for Open Source: Access to the software is way less interesting than the support/community/ecosystem around it; there's no reason not to open source your software and not doing it actually harms the users.

[dagmx]

Yeah, Pixar literally had to spin up VMs of their old software stack when they had to remaster the Toy Story films because it was less work than getting it running again on their current stack

[simondotau]

Actually, it seems to me VMs are an ideal way to preserve things like that. Perhaps it should be standard procedure for the archivists of such big films to build and preserve a fully functioning, self-sufficient rendering environment in the form of a virtual machine.