Ask Slashdot: A Development Environment Still Usable In 25 Years Time?

pev writes: I'm working on an embedded project that will need to be maintainable for the next 25 years. This raises the interesting question of how this can be best supported. The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years? Is anyone currently supporting software of a similar age that can share lessons learned from experience? Where do you choose to draw the line between handling likely issues and making things overly complicated?