Alright I know this is going to get some hate and I fully support emulation and an overhaul of US copyright and patent law but the justmeremember's supportive post is just bad. This is the same bad practice that many organizations, especially manufacturing, have problems with. If the ~20 years of raw data is so important, then why is it sitting on decades passed end-of-life stuff?

If it is worth the investment, then why not invest in a way to convert the data into something less dependent on EOL software? There's lots of ways, cheap and not to do this.

But even worse, I bet there 'raw' data that's only a year old still sitting on those machines. I don't know if the 'lab guy' actually pulls a salary or not but maybe hire someone to begin trying to actually solve the problem instead of maintaining an eventual losing game?

In ~20 years they couldn't be cutting slivers from the budget to eventually invest in something that would perhaps 'reset the clock?'

At this point I wouldn't be surprised to find a post of them complaining about Excel being too slow and unstable because they've been using it as a database for ~20 years worth of data at this point either.

Its incredibly wasteful, but there is another perspective.

When that microscope was purchased, it formed part of someone's budget throughout its service life. Support would have been guaranteed for that service life, but that life has now expired.

The company isn't obligated to assist buyers beyond that service life, and doing so would eat into current and future profits.

There is not a single commenter (nor downvoter) in this thread who would open the source for that microscope if they owned that microscope company.