Personally, I use a disk image for the emulator Mini vMac that contains the old MacPGP 2.6 and a text editor. This is easily carried on a USB stick, and can be used on Macintosh, Windows, or Linux computers (and there are other ports). Further, the disk image should work on other Mac emulators. Of course, I'm the maintainer of Mini vMac - this might not be the best solution for other people.
Moving from analog to digital technology solved this. And you can include a checksum with your file to be quite confident that your current copy is identical to the original.
I agree that virtual machines are a solution to file formats becoming obsolete, but I think that emulation may be more appropriate than virtualization for this purpose. VMware can only be used on x86 computers, and even on x86 computers future processors may have subtle differences that could affect old virtual machines. An emulation of an entire computer, including the processor, can be ported to any computer, and have exactly identical behavior.
Also, it may not be necessary to layer virtual machines inside each other, if you have an emulator that that is easy to port new machines, such as by being open source and relatively simple. That is a large part of the motivation for the Macintosh Plus emulator I maintain.
The address space of machines based on the 68000 is 16 megabytes, but since some of that space is taken by ROM and other memory mapped hardware, less is available for RAM. The Macintosh Plus and Macintosh SE are limited to 4 megabytes of RAM, the address space for the ROM is above that. The Macintosh Portable and Powerbook 100 can use more RAM, the Macintosh 128K/512K less. For more information, see Mini vMac, a Macintosh Plus emulator that I maintain, that can be recompiled to emulate the Macintosh 128K/512K or the Macintosh SE.
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Personally, I use a disk image for the emulator Mini vMac that contains the old MacPGP 2.6 and a text editor. This is easily carried on a USB stick, and can be used on Macintosh, Windows, or Linux computers (and there are other ports). Further, the disk image should work on other Mac emulators. Of course, I'm the maintainer of Mini vMac - this might not be the best solution for other people.
Moving from analog to digital technology solved this. And you can include a checksum with your file to be quite confident that your current copy is identical to the original.
I agree that virtual machines are a solution to file formats becoming obsolete, but I think that emulation may be more appropriate than virtualization for this purpose. VMware can only be used on x86 computers, and even on x86 computers future processors may have subtle differences that could affect old virtual machines. An emulation of an entire computer, including the processor, can be ported to any computer, and have exactly identical behavior.
Also, it may not be necessary to layer virtual machines inside each other, if you have an emulator that that is easy to port new machines, such as by being open source and relatively simple. That is a large part of the motivation for the Macintosh Plus emulator I maintain.
The address space of machines based on the 68000 is 16 megabytes, but since some of that space is taken by ROM and other memory mapped hardware, less is available for RAM. The Macintosh Plus and Macintosh SE are limited to 4 megabytes of RAM, the address space for the ROM is above that. The Macintosh Portable and Powerbook 100 can use more RAM, the Macintosh 128K/512K less. For more information, see Mini vMac, a Macintosh Plus emulator that I maintain, that can be recompiled to emulate the Macintosh 128K/512K or the Macintosh SE.