Eric Traut | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Education | Stanford University |
Occupation | Software engineer |
Employer | Microsoft |
Known for | Virtual PC, Virtual Game Station |
Title | Technical Fellow |
Eric Traut is an American software engineer and software emulation pioneer. Traut graduated from Stanford University in 1992. From 1993 to 1995 he worked for Apple Computer, creating a Mac 68K emulator to be used in PowerPC-based Macintoshes. [1] His work on this project led to a patent on a form of dynamic recompilation. [2]
Traut went on to join Connectix, where he developed successful commercial emulators such as Virtual PC and Virtual Game Station. He became Connectix's Chief Technical Officer in 2001.
Traut became a Microsoft employee after the company purchased Connectix in 2003. Traut left Microsoft in late 2012. Traut rejoined Microsoft in May 2014 and is now a Technical Fellow.
In computer science, dynamic recompilation is a feature of some emulators and virtual machines, where the system may recompile some part of a program during execution. By compiling during execution, the system can tailor the generated code to reflect the program's run-time environment, and potentially produce more efficient code by exploiting information that is not available to a traditional static compiler.
In computing, binary translation is a form of binary recompilation where sequences of instructions are translated from a source instruction set to the target instruction set. In some cases such as instruction set simulation, the target instruction set may be the same as the source instruction set, providing testing and debugging features such as instruction trace, conditional breakpoints and hot spot detection.
The Mac 68k emulator is a software emulator built into all versions of the classic Mac OS for PowerPC. This emulator enabled running applications and system code that were originally written for the 680x0-based Macintosh models. With a few exceptions, notably Connectix's RAM Doubler, the emulator ran all software with no noticeable impact other than lower performance relative to the same program when compiled for PowerPC.
The Virtual Game Station was an emulator by Connectix that allows Sony PlayStation games to be played on a desktop computer. It was first released for the Macintosh, in 1999, after being previewed at Macworld/iWorld the same year by Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller. VGS was created by Aaron Giles. The recompiling CPU emulator was written by Eric Traut.
Virtual PC is an x86 emulator for PowerPC Mac hosts and a virtualization app for Microsoft Windows hosts. It was created by Connectix in 1997 and acquired by Microsoft in 2003. The Mac version was discontinued in 2006 following the Mac transition to Intel, while the Windows version was discontinued in 2011 in favour of Hyper-V.
Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became popular. It was formed in October 1988 by Jon Garber; dominant board members and co-founders were Garber, Bonnie Fought, and close friend Roy McDonald. McDonald was still Chief Executive Officer and president when Connectix finally closed in August 2003.
Gavare's eXperimental Emulator is a computer architecture emulator being developed by Anders Gavare. It is available as free software under a revised BSD-style license. In 2005, Gavare changed the name of the software project from mips64emul to GXemul. This was to avoid giving the impression that the emulator was confined to the MIPS architecture, which was the only architecture being emulated initially.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates a computer's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.
A Macintosh clone is a computer running the Mac OS operating system that was not produced by Apple Inc. The earliest Mac clones were based on emulators and reverse-engineered Macintosh ROMs. During Apple's short lived Mac OS 7 licensing program, authorized Mac clone makers were able to either purchase 100% compatible motherboards or build their own hardware using licensed Mac reference designs.
Virtual DOS machines (VDM) refer to a technology that allows running 16-bit/32-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows programs when there is already another operating system running and controlling the hardware.
SoftPC is a software emulator of x86 hardware. It was developed by Rod MacGregor, Henry Nash & Phil Bousfield, following the founding of Insignia Solutions in 1986 by MacGregor, with "about a dozen people who had left the CAD/CAM workstation specialist Computervision", believing in a market opportunity for an independent CAD/CAM consultancy. Originally a side project, SoftPC quickly became the main focus for the company, running PC software on workstations. Originally developed on SPARCstations, the first customer to license the software was Intergraph whose workstation had a proprietary processor architecture. Available originally on UNIX workstations to run MS-DOS, the software was ported to the Macintosh in 1987, and later gained the ability to run Microsoft Windows software. Besides Mac OS, supported platforms included SGI IRIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, NeXTSTEP, Motorola 88000, OpenVMS on VAX and DEC Alpha systems, DEC ULTRIX, and others.
The following is a timeline of virtualization development. In computing, virtualization is the use of a computer to simulate another computer. Through virtualization, a host simulates a guest by exposing virtual hardware devices, which may be done through software or by allowing access to a physical device connected to the machine.
In the context of computer programming, instrumentation refers to the measure of a product's performance, in order to diagnose errors and to write trace information. Instrumentation can be of two types: source instrumentation and binary instrumentation.
Binary-code compatibility is a property of a computer system, meaning that it can run the same executable code, typically machine code for a general-purpose computer Central processing unit (CPU), that another computer system can run. Source-code compatibility, on the other hand, means that recompilation or interpretation is necessary before the program can be run on the compatible system.
VHD and its successor VHDX are file formats representing a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). They may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders. They are typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine, are built into modern versions of Windows, and are the native file format for Microsoft's hypervisor, Hyper-V.
Cross-platform virtualization is a form of computer virtualization that allows software compiled for a specific instruction set and operating system to run unmodified on computers with different CPUs and/or operating systems, through a combination of dynamic binary translation and operating system call mapping.
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system to behave like another computer system. An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use peripheral devices designed for the guest system. Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program in an electronic device to emulate another program or device.
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corporation, 203 F.3d 596 (2000), is a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which ruled that the copying of a copyrighted BIOS software during the development of an emulator software does not constitute copyright infringement, but is covered by fair use. The court also ruled that Sony's PlayStation trademark had not been tarnished by Connectix Corp.'s sale of its emulator software, the Virtual Game Station.
In computing, a system virtual machine is a virtual machine (VM) that provides a complete system platform and supports the execution of a complete operating system (OS). These usually emulate an existing architecture, and are built with the purpose of either providing a platform to run programs where the real hardware is not available for use, or of having multiple instances of virtual machines leading to more efficient use of computing resources, both in terms of energy consumption and cost effectiveness, or both. A VM was originally defined by Popek and Goldberg as "an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine".