Transitive announced its sponsorship of Digital60 Day, an event hosted by the University of Manchester in the UK to mark the 60th anniversary of the successful running of a program on a digital computer.

As with the first digital computer (nicknamed the 'Baby' by its inventors), the innovative technology behind Transitive's successful cross-platform virtualization solutions was pioneered at the University of Manchester. Transitive was founded in 2000 as a spin-off from the university, to commercialize the results of a promising research project. Transitive's development team is based in Manchester, and includes many graduates from the university's School of Computer Science.

"Digital60 Day is a significant milestone for the University of Manchester, which has played a key role in the evolution of computing and continues to attract world-class talent in its students," said Alasdair Rawsthorne, founder and CTO of Transitive and lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Manchester. "In my research at the university, I have been privileged to collaborate with some of the finest young engineering minds, and I am grateful that many of them now apply their talents to perfecting cross-platform virtualization solutions at Transitive. Our sponsorship of Digital60 Day reflects Transitive's continuing partnership with the university and our mutual goal of attracting the next generation of innovators to consider careers in computing."

Intended to commemorate the University of Manchester's role as the birthplace of modern computing, Digital60 Day has an emphasis on schoolchildren, in order to promote computing as a career option. The Schools Digital60 Day events will include a computer animation festival and awards presentation, interactive exhibits (including opportunities to program a replica of the original 'Baby') and presentations by Computer Science faculty. The Industrial Forum is a biennial event aimed at employers that showcases the latest research taking place at the School of Computer Science, and the Kilburn Lecture (named after Tom Kilburn, one of the inventors of the 'Baby' computer) is an annual event that showcases achievements in the field of advanced computing.

Transitive's QuickTransit cross-platform virtualization solutions allow software applications to run on any hardware platform without any source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports. By deploying QuickTransit on the latest computing platforms, enterprise data center managers can replicate workloads that were previously tied to a single hardware platform and run them unmodified, without incurring the costs and delays of porting projects, and without disruption to end users. Such quick and easy workload replication provides the basis for cost-effective business continuity solutions, including disaster recovery, scalability and dynamic workload re-balancing.

To address the most typical customer deployments, Transitive offers three configurations of its QuickTransit product line: QuickTransit Workstation is intended for use on desktop and laptop PCs; QuickTransit Server is used for large-scale datacenter consolidation projects; and QuickTransit Legacy is a specialized version for application re-hosting from very old legacy hardware running operating system versions that are no longer supported.