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A lot of old mission-critical banking or commercial software systems have been running on those machines for decades. Before the AI age, it'd seem impossible to migrate those programs off. Now with the AI help, there might be a glimpse of hope.

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Honestly, a lot of it was not that hard to port if you really wanted, it's just that the ROI of replacing the entire stack including physical machines was not necessarily good. The parts where ROI was good got replaced already.

I guess you could line-for-line duplicate functionality, but that's just like running the binary in an emulator with extra steps.

Part of the value of a migration would be the opportunity to to unwind some of the details that are contradictory, mis- or non-documented, or wrong-but-unfixable.

The logic changes can be done without destroying investment in the current ecosystem though. So they are really handled separately in terms of planning/budgeting.

Also, a lot of the problematic issues are related not to fixing the local code, but dealing with stuff like external systems or pre-existing legacy data that you need to be able to read back after 30 years from cold storage.

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