You might have noticed adverts recently for the Amstrad E-mailer Plus. This little device supports Net access, email, SMS text messaging, and - sometime in the future - secure credit card transactions, according to Amstrad. There's also the facility to download Sinclair Spectrum games.

Seeing this advert on the telly takes you right back to the halcyon days of Manic Miner, Ant Attack, Lunar Jetman and the Pi-man. Well - it would if the Emailer had an 8bit colour screen with a resolution of 256x192 pixels.

The point I'm trying to make is that the environment that legacy applications need to run on can be emulated - would you call Jet Set Willy a legacy application? - without requiring the original hardware.

Back in the world of enterprise IT, there are two leading protagonists in virtual environments: Connectix and VMWare. Both allow operating systems and applications that might otherwise soon be useless to be given a new lease of life.

Some firms find they can run old operating systems under this software, and others are continuing to run legacy applications, which would cost a fortune to rewrite for a new operating system.

Legacy software is like the crown jewels to many large companies, and they don't want to throw it away. If they abandoned legacy systems, their employees would have to be retrained to use new software and operating systems, and there would probably be bugs to be removed. But a virtual server running OS/2 on a Windows system, for example, might avoid the problem.

Virtual computers have other advantages. They allow a much easier upgrade path, since you can train administration staff how to handle servers or workstations using an entirely different operating system without them burning down the building.

I spoke to one of the software vendors in this area, and he said he could have three virtual Windows 2000 computers running and induce a "blue screen of death" on just one of them, emphasising just how good the software is at replicating real-world scenarios.

For desktop or workstation users, Connectix or VMWare's tools can offer the ability to use multiple operating systems simultaneously, to match the applications you need to run. One benefit is that if a virtual Windows PC becomes infected with a virus it can simply be deleted and recreated again with a few mouse clicks.

But the main advantages of this technology may be felt in the server world. Firms could use it instead of partitioning to consolidate several different Linux or Windows servers onto one larger, more reliable mach-ine, creating new virtual servers as demand requires. VMWare says that its products can bring mainframe levels of reliability and security, but at a lower cost.

So, Web server, DNS server, database server, DHCP server or dot-Net server could all be run happily on a single box, communicating with each other through virtual network cards.

Who knows, with the release of Itanium 2 imminent, perhaps IT managers will be able to emulate Itanium 2 systems running 64bit Windows on existing hardware, before committing themselves to the new platform.

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