In 2015 Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay proposed a simple 32 bit virtual machine called “Chifir” in their paper “The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015”. The idea is to store executable versions of historical software systems to that future archeologists can just implement the simple VM in whatever computer they have and then experience the saved software.
The instruction set is not very compact - each instruction takes four 32 bit words even though several instructions need less than three arguments and there are fewer than 16 instructions (so a 32 bit opcode is absurdly wasteful).