After actually watching Tron: Legacy on the big screen (it released here today), I have to say that the film touched me. I'd recommend catching it wherever you are, once it is out. ** SPOILER WARNING ** Other than that, the thing that caught my attention was the fact that the depiction of the unix command-line interface is real. They actually did a 'ps -ef | grep ....' and a 'kill -9 ....' and what nots. And the Tron universe runs on (presumably) SUN hardware under some sort of 'SolarOS'. Plus, the film paid a small tribute to FLOSS software - setting software free.

I second the virtual machine idea. That would give you the most guarantee of running the system through the years. Regardless of how hardware interfaces may change, you can always virtualise things. I had to do something similar recently - moving an older application onto newer hardware. KVM really saved my skin.

Would NVIDIA be able to do a Transmeta? Seeing that their GPUs are supposed to be more and more CPU-like, maybe they could translate the whole x86 instruction set in software?

i used to do some work for these people.. they might be able to point you in the right direction.. http://www.globalknowledge.org/