Dawn of Emulation

This is a brief experiment aiming to find traces of the initial development of platform emulation systems, via our current full-text search index of the historical UK web. This Twitter conversation was the initial spark.

Traces

Most of the early hits for ‘emulation’ brings up results for terminal emulation, or in some cases, things like Floating Point Unit (FPU) emulation. However, some evidence of platform emulation also appears:

• 1995:
  • Linux m68k mailing list November 1995
    • Start of a thread on TOS emulation
  • Linux m68k mailing list December 1995
    • Start of a thread on Using the Executor Mac Emulator from ARDI
• 1996:
  • Mention of a Spectrum emulator called xzx
  • AmigaOS emulation on Linux, probably.
    • Parent page, for mailing list navigation
    • Manually tracking back, we find early mention of the Unusable Amiga Emulator (UAE)
  • A reference to a sadly missing CLASSIC COMPUTER PAGE
• 1997:
  • Reference to a Java Spectrum emulator that points to Jasper.
  • Reference to a list of Spectrum emulators
  • Amiga emulation resources
  • A November 1997 article about Virtual PC - “Connectix Corporation’s Macintosh application that emulates a PC and its peripherals”

Summary

There is clear evidence of the development and distribution of emulators in 1995 on the UK web. Some of the Spectrum emulators seem quite well established by 1996, so it seems likely that we would have to track back a couple more years to get to their initial releases.

To do so, we would have to reach into the time before the web went mainstream (our web archive holds very little content prior to 1996). Full-text search of Usenet or BBS archives, or of the Internet Archive Software Collection would probably be required.

UPDATE: Indeed, just noticed this, which lead me to this 1995 Spectrum emulator release, and a lot of other old stuff. Looks like site-based searching can use this to dig back further, e.g. site:cd.textfiles.com 1994 emulation leads us to the Frodo C64 emulator.

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