Fast Hardware Enables Better Emulation
Another type of software emulation is modeling, where a piece of software emulates a machine or an animal or a brain process.
When a software emulation is good enough, you cannot tell the difference from the original.
Case Study
But to run our in-house software, on a different hardware platform meant we had to create a software emulator: it interpreted our old code, in real-time, and ran it on the new hardware. This including simulating Registers, which was quite a big slowdown. Nevertheless, it all worked - and Tymnet moved to the new platform, called Turbo Engine Nodes (described in Wikipedia). So that problem was solved - though, competing with a new network (called, the internet) proved a much bigger challenge.
Evolution of Software
It was also believed that the greatly increasing complexity of CPU's and chips meant that fewer and fewer companies would do their own hardware - but this is also changing. Now that there are so many people with expertise, and so much outsourcing possible, companies have more opportunity to do their own, sophisticated hardware - and Tesla's new AI chip for self-driving cars is a great example of that. You can learn more about emulation in Wikipedia.
The Future of Software Emulation
One thing is for sure - human programmers will have jobs for a long time to come, and haing some skill at coding - even if just for scripts - is potentially useful for anyone.