[ale] Emulator vs. Virtual Machine

[hbbs at comcast.net (Jeff Hubbs)]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 12:53, David Corbin wrote:
<snip>
> VMWare is both an emulator and 
> virtual machine.  It emulates hardware, but all the Intel instruction 
> set is processed by your actual Intel (compatible) CPU.

Exactly.  It's an emulator in the sense that it provides an emulation of
a BIOS, but it is better regarded as a virtual machine.  If it were a
proper emulator, you could break the processor barrier with it and run,
say, VMS on VMware on Linux (although to do that, you'd have/want to
also emulate VMS' file system, which is among the coolest ever
developed).  

- Jeff