Claims of ‘firsts’ undermine the authority of this document, though not the achievements of the subject.
For instance Marco Ternelli’s dynamic binary translator ZM/HT dates back to 1993, when it was published by Ergon Development. It translates Z80 to 68000 machine code on the fly and was a successful commercial product. I’d be interested to hear of earlier JIT binary to binary implementations, especially others which coped with self-modifying code, without which ZM/HT wouldn’t have been very useful.
Self-unpacking executables are at least a decade older, and Fabrice quite likely had Microsoft’s 1985 EXEPACK, written by Reuben Borman, on his computer when he came up with LZEXE. That was bundled with MASM and Microsoft C 3.0, their first in-house version. Both were preceded by Realia’s Spacemaker product, which Wikipedia says was written by Robert B. K. Dewar in 1982.
For instance Marco Ternelli’s dynamic binary translator ZM/HT dates back to 1993, when it was published by Ergon Development. It translates Z80 to 68000 machine code on the fly and was a successful commercial product. I’d be interested to hear of earlier JIT binary to binary implementations, especially others which coped with self-modifying code, without which ZM/HT wouldn’t have been very useful.
Self-unpacking executables are at least a decade older, and Fabrice quite likely had Microsoft’s 1985 EXEPACK, written by Reuben Borman, on his computer when he came up with LZEXE. That was bundled with MASM and Microsoft C 3.0, their first in-house version. Both were preceded by Realia’s Spacemaker product, which Wikipedia says was written by Robert B. K. Dewar in 1982.