The patch you can't apply

Somewhere on an industrial estate in the south of the Netherlands stands a machine that every year ships one and a half million euros worth of packaged products out of the factory. The machine is of German make, built in 1998, and runs on an embedded version of Windows NT 4.0. There is no patch for Windows NT 4.0. There is no vendor offering support for it. The maker of the machine closed its doors in 2014. The last piece of documentation about its configuration hangs in a binder in a metal cabinet next to the machine, yellowed and dusty, with handwritten notes from someone who retired ten