"Work on Wine started in 1993, and its roots can be traced back the early 1990s crop of DOS and Windows emulators for UNIX. The Wine project began by porting 16-bit applications to Linux, and in a few years' time could run Microsoft Word and Excel on Linux. Today it encompasses more than one million lines of code.
"It has been said that one of the main barriers to Linux adoption on the desktop is a lack of applications. Commercial desktop application vendors aren't yet sure if they should invest the time and effort to port their Windows applications to Linux and are essentially waiting for Linux on the desktop to take off. On the other hand, for Linux to take off on the desktop, it needs applications. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and Wine helps resolve it by allowing existing Windows applications to run on Linux..."
