Gratitude Day 4: Virtualization / Emulation

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…