Gratitude Day 4: Virtualization / Emulation
Fri 04 September 2026
I think I first heard about emulation in the early 1990s. Some kind of magical software could make your Mac pretend it was a PC, albeit quite slowly. It was very niche and expensive software, but it allowed folks to run software designed for a completely different architecture. Black magic!!
I'm pretty sure the first time I actually saw emulation was in 1994, when the first PowerPC-based macs came out. Apple bundled a very fast emulator that ran 68000 code on the PowerPC. They boasted that their slowest PowerPC model could run 68000 software as quickly as the feastest 68040 available. Well, "it ain't necessarily so" (with apologies to George Gershwin), but the technology was still quite impressive.
Later on in the 1990s, emulation software for games was becoming pretty commonplace, and I recall playing Super Mario Brothers in an emulator on a PC in the late 90s or early 2000s. That alone was pretty amazing, and the dark arts of emulation has pretty much exploded ever since.
I also recall playing with Executor in the early 2000s, and it blew me away that my PC could emulate a classic 68000 mac.
The next big step I remember in the development and propagation of this technology is when VMWare started getting insanely popular in the early 2000s, doing what was supposedly impossible on the x86 architecture: full virtualization of modern OSes (and not just simpler 8 and 16-bit systems). I remember using large VMWare clusters at work in the early days, and it was quite impressive for the technology at the time: this was long before the Intel architecture got hardware-based virtualization instructions added, so everything was happening entirely in software. It wasn't super fast, but it worked, and that alone was pretty amazing. It provided a ton of flexibility for standing up systems that didn't need peak performance, but rather, flexibility.
Nowadays, emulation and virtualization is so widespread, a lot of folks don't even realize they're using it. Most modern games consoles provide older games through emulation, and even some PC games sold today are using emulators to run games designed for older architectures, like Dark Castle.
Emulation even happens in the browser nowadays! I'm not super fond of the security and privacy implications of advanced web technologies like WASM, but it really allows for some amazing web-based applications, like Infinite Mac and v86.
Of course, WebAssembly itself is a virtual machine, along with language-level VMs like Java's JVM and the even cooler and more portable uxn.
You might even be reading this inside of a virtual machine! Would you know it if you were?
Uhh... "Computer, end simulation. Computer???" 😜
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