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Well, that's... not smart. Maintaining Win95 on actual hardware and implying they'd lose the data if those ancient pieces of crap went down? Big yikes. One thing is "how did you not virtualize this 10+ years ago", but man, backups??
You can't virtualize it because you need to physically plug in the hardware, and backups are useless if you can't read the files without the Win95 software.
You can connect VMs to physical ports. We use a Win XP VM to connect through a USB to serial converter to get data from devices 30+ years old. You can make and use backups because the VM can run the original software.
Some lab equip has proprietary ports that would need reverse engineering to make and use a USB adapter.
That's fair, I read virtualize as "cloud/hardware far away" and not "local physical machine with a VM on it".