Quote:
Originally Posted by Crowriver
It's all relative. Apple switched processor architecture 15 years ago - that was a big shift but applications written for PowerPC still worked on Mac Intel operating system for five years afterwards.
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So they had some sort of PowerPC interpreter on the Intel? They had that back when they switched from the Motorola 68000 to the PowerPC. Software could also be compiled so that the binary/executable contained both the 68000 and PowerPC executable; they were called fat binaries. If it only contained the 68000 code then the interpreter ran it. Of course it was noticeably slower when running through the interpreter. The weirdest part was that the interpreter could be used by the operating system and some parts of it were still in 68000 code. I could never understand why my coworker's Macs were so unbelievably slow with internet until I learned that their networking code was still 68000. Back then the internet was a bit of a newfangled gizmo so I guess Apple couldn't see a profit in rewriting what was probably 68000 assembly language code.