> Wine is a great project, and truly 'is not an emulator'.
The Wine is not an emulator thing has an interesting history. It originally was officially called an emulator. The change was largely due to essentially marketing.
The first suggestion for the "Wine Is Not an Emulator" language was made in 1993, over concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems with Microsoft. That suggestion was by Bob Amstadt [1] in a post where he also explained how the name "wine" came about. His original thought when he started the project was to name it "winemu", but didn't like that and shortened it to "wine", which led him to "whine" and "whinny". He liked "whine" but felt it was too long.
As far as I can tell, nothing ever came of that 1993 post. By 1997, though, the "not an emulator" meaning was in use as an alternative. According to the Wine FAQ from late 1997 [2]: "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".
Calling Wine an emulator was dropped between releases 981108 and 981211. The 981108 release notes [3] say "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator", and the 981211 release notes [4] say "This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix".
The dropping of calling Wine an emulator appears to have taken place for two reasons. One was that Wine could be used for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library that could be linked with Windows source that was compiled on Unix in order to make a stand-alone Unix binary of a Windows program.
The other was that most users had only encountered emulators that emulated hardware (e.g., emulators that emulated old gaming systems or old 8-bit personal computers). Those emulators tended to be slow, which led most users to make the unjustified assumption that emulation necessarily implied slowness. If Wine was called an emulator many people would assume that programs running under Wine would be massively slower than those same programs running on a real Windows system. (I once had sources for the claims in this and the preceding paragraph but did not save them, and have not been able to rediscover them. They were probably posts in comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine in the late '90s if anyone with better search skills wants to have a go at it).
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.linux.mis...
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...
[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...
[4] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...