Comment Virtualize and use an _OLD_ OS (Score 1) 313
I've seen comments (but no clarification from OP) about these being 16-bit apps, and also mentions of Virtualization.
Excellent idea. But one big benefit of virtualization is that you can run these apps in the oldest available OS you can grab. Are they DOS apps? Grab an MS-DOS 6.22 image and install it into a tiny virtual machine with, say, 4MB of memory. If that's all they need, why give them more (and a giant base OS like Windows XP)?
The benefit here is that if you have dozens of these legacy apps, you can put _each of them_ into its own virtual machine, each taking up only 4MB or whatever, and you can run all this on a beefy 64-bit server for your newer software.
I think Hyper-V can run MS-DOS in a VM. If not, you can consider using VMware's free Server 1.0, or Workstation (both of which run on Windows).