About 18 months ago, an unknown software startup called Transitive launched a product called QuickTransit, which allows operating systems and applications that were designed for one computing architecture to be run, without changes, on another architecture. Last summer, Transitive broke onto the scene when Silicon Graphics chose it to support Irix Unix applications created for MIPS servers on its Linux-Itanium Altix machines, and then was made famous when Apple used QuickTransit at the heart of the Rosetta environment that allowed it to quickly move from PowerPC to Intel processors.
More