4 ms·

The points you are missing are 2003 and Celeron. Efficient and easy virtualization is relatively recent.

• thrownaway2424 11y ago
  VMWare Workstation was already on its 4th major release by 2003.
  • mattdotc 11y ago
    Which wasn't really free if I remember correctly. You had to buy or crack it. Also, I don't think the performance really compared on consumer desktop hardware. As annoying as dual-booting was, it was the way all of my hobbyist friends and I preferred back then. edit: grammar
  • dsp1234 11y ago
    Hardware virtualization for intel/amd processors did not come until 2006. So you could run VMWare and get decent performance with paravirtualized drivers, but running a completely different OS would have required software virtualization, and it was not fast by any means. Booting to the other operating system was a much better experience since the OS would then have full use of the resources without software virtualization being in the way.
    • wang_li 11y ago
      Software only virtualization was faster than the first generation of hardware supported virtualization. See page 7. of this document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf http://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf
      • thrownaway2424 11y ago
        Indeed. It is quite amazing how history is being revised here. Software virtualization was extremely useful from day 1.