Emulators are neat, and they allow systems that should have died decades ago to run as if they'd just been ripped off of the assembly line. But are they practically useful and will they ever be? Sure, I enjoy playing Elite on my iMac running OS X, but I'm not about to trade in even AppleWorks for Speedscript just yet.

Will there ever be a time we long to use useful application from a dead system? Classic on OS X is getting close, as I've got a newsreader and mail client I like using weekly or so. If my next Mac doesn't have Classic for some strange reason, I'd like to grab a Mac OS 7.6+ emulator to keep things running.

But are there examples of productivity software that people use mainly through emulators now because those applications are still better?