Manchester, UK (Mercury News): Further to the news that Apple is to start using Intel rather than IBM chips has brought to light technology known as binary translation, to ensure the software running on the older systems can run on the new ones. In this case the system was developed by Transitive, a company formed in 2000 by researchers at the University of Manchester in England.
The software consists of three parts. One part is a decoder, which takes the code of the older software and converts it into an intermediate format. The second part is the core processing engine.' The core takes the intermediate format and figures out how fast it can run the older software in its new form.