I worked in an office with a similar setup that "worked", but it was very fragile. When the HDD started failing on the old 486 machine we scrambled to migrate as much as possible (including a few rewrites and ports of utility programs). We were lucky that our problem was the software not running on modern systems (for reasons), not a dependency on the hardware. Mostly we communicated with hardware systems via serial, so any computer with a serial port (or a USB-to-serial adapter, which are often unreliable) could be made to work if the software existed.