Virtual PC

Before Parallels, before Boot Camp, before your laptop ran Windows ARM VMs like it was nothing, there was Virtual PC: a PowerPC Mac pretending, entirely in software, to be an entire Intel computer. Processor, BIOS, video card, the works. You installed Windows 98 inside a window on your Macintosh and it ran. Slowly. And we were grateful.

Connectix did it first

Virtual PC came from Connectix, a San Mateo company with a gift for doing things that sounded illegal:

• RAM Doubler — made your 8MB of memory act like more, somehow.
• Virtual Game Station — a PlayStation emulator for PowerPC Macs, released 1999. Sony sued. Connectix won on appeal: Sony v. Connectix (9th Cir. 2000) held that reverse-engineering a console to make an emulator was fair use. That case is load-bearing for every emulator project that exists today.
• Virtual PC — the flagship. Dynamic recompilation translating x86 to PowerPC on the fly, fast enough to be miserable instead of unusable. Office documents opened. Doom ran. Nobody cared that it was a quarter of native speed; the alternative was owning a second computer shaped like a beige pizza box.

Microsoft hated the idea so much they bought it — Virtual PC landed at Redmond in 2003, and shipped as Microsoft Virtual PC through version 7 for OS X.

How it died

Ironically. Virtual PC emulated x86 chips using PowerPC code. When Macs switched to x86 in 2006, the product's entire premise evaporated overnight — Intel Macs could run Windows natively or virtualize it at near-native speed, and Microsoft had zero interest in porting an emulator whose job was making Intel pretend to be Motorola. Parallels Desktop shipped that exact year, ate the category in one bite, and Virtual PC became a trivia answer.

Verdict

Kids today complain about VM setup wizards taking two clicks. We watched an entire fake Pentium boot Windows 95 from within a window on a G3, at the speed of continental drift, and we said thank you. Pepperidge Farm remembers. So does case law.