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Transitive's products lie behind the ability of Apple to use Intel chips and can be credited with rapid sales acceleration for Apple's laptops. The sales of Apple computers roughly doubled from 2006 to 2009, reflecting the successful change in platform that Rosetta helped to bring about. Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (1864-1930) A Liverpool born electrical engineer, moved the company from London to Oldham in 1896 to allow the business to grow. During the 1930s the company developed and supplied defence electronics such as the valves used in radios and Radar. These technologies were the platform for the early computing developments of the late 1940s and the company started to explore potential uses. It had already been collaborating with the University since the 1930s on electronic technology. Its investigations showed that Manchester was ahead of its US counterparts in developing computer technology and within two months of the successful test run of the University's 'Baby' computer in June 1948, a full-scale version was under way and Ferranti was investigating commercial production. Alasdair joined the University in 1977 having seen through a complete development cycle with ICL to Transitive Corporation undertake research which was designed to build a highly reliable, high performance, general purpose processor technology. "Nobody else had tried to do this before, to combine these three axes". The research focus behind Transitive came from practical experience of working with industry. This had demonstrated the problems in trying to design high performance software in which the hardware targets kept shifting 1 . The challenge was demonstrated by this real world problem. The software had to be fast in translation, reliable in modeling every aspect of all the target instruction sets for different hardware platforms and fast in operation - compared with operating system emulators. Not only would it have to solve the software portability- problem it would also need to be able to separate the design of silicon processor chips from the need to support legacy software. This would make the design easier. The Manchester Mark 1 computer, 'Baby', in 1948 65