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Transitive Corporation 64 UNIVERSITY SPIN-OUT "Manchester gave the company a direct pipeline to recruit exactly the right type of students..." The Transitive Corporation was formed in 2000, based on technology developed in the University's Department of Computer Science. However, Transitive's roots lie in the orientation of the University's Department of Electrical Engineering towards the fundamentals of computing ("hard, nitty-gritty type stuff"), which go back to the late 19th century when Sebastian Ferranti relocated to Oldham from Deptford, London (see panel). Ferranti sold its computing business to a predecessor of ICL Ltd. ICL consolidated its hardware development teams in the former Ferranti plant in West Gorton in Manchester. This brought specialists including Alasdair Rawsthorne (the inventor behind Transitive) to Manchester. Transitive's first product, Quick Transit, was successfully deployed on several processor architectures but the one with the greatest impact was the Rosetta implementation for Apple, which enabled Apple laptops to run on Intel processors rather than Power PC. Intel processors had much better performance for mobile computing than Power PC. There was a significant acceleration in Apple laptop sales from the deployment of Rosetta onward. This success was born from a long pathway of development over decades. The story illustrates perfectly the iterative process and persistence that often lies behind successful innovation. Transitive was bought by IBM in 2009 as a result of which the computing giant now has a research lab in central Manchester 1 IBM were pushing the power behind Power Pc, Digital had just launched the DEC, MIPS had their own instruction and SUN Microsystems had SPARC