Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
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.
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They called it Rosetta, after the famous stone. I believe the interpreter for Intel code on Apple ARM will be Rosetta 2. Software that was compiled for Intel and PowerPC was a universal binary. So maybe there will be a similar approach to the coming transition.
I used several 68000 based Macs back in the day: Macintosh Plus, SE, LCII, then the unimaginable (to my mind) power of the 68040 based Centris 660AV. One benefit of the latter was a faster serial port (Geoport), useful for connecting a modem emulator...
All really useful machines at the time, especially for DTP, word processing and latterly internet communications.