Comment by tzs

The people who wrote Wine thought it was an emulator. Their first idea for a name was "winemu" but they didn't like that, then thought to shorten it to "wine".

The "Wine is not an emulator" suggestion was first made in 1993, not because Wine is not an emulator but because there was concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems.

Eventually that was accepted as an alternative meaning to the name. The Wine FAQ up until late 1997 said "The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best".

The release notes called it an emulator up through release 981108: "The is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator".

The next release changed that to "This is release 981211 of Wine, free implementation of Windows on Unix".

As far as I've been able to tell, there were two reasons they stopped saying it was an emulator.

First, there were two ways you could use it. You could use it the original way, as a Windows emulator on Unix to run Windows binaries. But if you had the source to a Windows program you could you could compile that source on Unix and link with libraries from Wine. That would give you a real native Unix binary. In essence this was using Wine as Unix app framework.

Second most people who would be likely to use Wine had probably only ever encountered emulators before that were emulating hardware. For example there was Virtual PC from Connectix for Mac, which came out in 1997, and there were emulators on Linux for various old 8-bit systems such as NES and Apple II.

Those emulators were doing CPU emulation and that was not fast in those days. It really only worked acceptably well if you were emulating hardware that had been a couple of orders of magnitude slower than your current computer.

Continuing to say that Wine is an emulator would likely cause many people to think it must be slow too and so skip it.