emulator
(ˈɛmjʊleɪtə(r))
Also 7 æmulator, emulatour.
[a. L. æmulātor zealous imitator.]
1. One who emulates, in good or bad sense. † a. A rival, competitor; also, one who enviously disparages. Obs.
| 1589 Greene Menaphon (Arb.) 81 You are friendly emulators in honest fancie. 1600 Shakes. A.Y.L. i. i. 150 An enuious emulator of every mans good parts. 1628 tr. Camden's Hist. Eliz. ii. (1688) 198 George Buchanan, his Emulatour..set him forth..as one more mutable than the Chameleon. 1750 Johnson Rambler No. 54 The emotions which the death of an emulator or competitor produces. |
b. A zealous imitator; one who strives to equal the qualities or achievements of another. Const. of.
| 1652 J. Hall Height Eloquence p. lxii, Hyperides is a great Emulatour of Demosthenes. 1738 Warburton Div. Legat. App. 30 A happy emulator of the eloquence of Cicero. 1837–9 Hallam Hist. Lit. i. ciii. §128 A diligent emulator of Grocyn..was..Linacre. 1875 Jowett Plato (ed. 2) I. 158 Emulators and disciples of the culture of the Lacedaemonians. |
¶ 2. (In the Douay-Rheims Bible.) Used to render L. æmulator: a. One who is zealous for a cause, etc.; const. of. b. Applied to God: A ‘jealous’ being, one who brooks no competitor.
| 1582 N.T. (Rhem.) Gal. i. 14, I..being more aboundantly an emulator of the traditions of my fathers. 1609 Bible (Douay) Ex. xxxiv. 14 God is an emulatour. ― 2 Macc. iv. 2 The..emulatour of the law of God. |
3. Computing. A piece of hardware or software used with one device to enable it to emulate another, esp. to enable a computer to run programs written for a different type of computer.
| 1965 Communications Assoc. Computing Machinery VIII. 753/2 An emulator is a package that includes both special hardware and a complementary set of software. Ibid. 754/1 The speed of an emulator can be increased if more instructions are added to the emulating machine. 1983 What's New in Computing Jan. 18/2 The remote batch emulator lets the ACT Sirius 1 communicate with equipment that supports one or more members of the IBM family of remote batch entry stations. 1983 Austral. Microcomputer Mag. Sept. 65/1 The emulator divides the system's memory into two sections. One section holds the operating system and whatever applications program is running. The second section of memory is used to emulate a disk drive. 1985 Byte Mar. 404 (heading) An assembly-language emulator program. |