Wine actually IS an emulator, just not the kind of emulator you think of. While wine is not an virtual machine, it literally emulates the win32 api.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150928042254/http://wiki.wineh...

I mentioned the shift of meaning to "virtual machine" in the post you replied to, please read it more carefully.

Emulation and Simulation are different in some regard: emulation is only imitating some aspect of a thing, while simulation imitates a thing by using (usually physical) models.

xterm is a VTxxx emulator, and VT simulator does look like this: https://www.pcjs.org/machines/dec/vt100/

I'd argue that wine is a bit of a stretch considering that we're on the third implemention of win32 in Microsoft land as well (DOS/win32s, Win95, NT/Win32k). At that point win32 is a concept already abstracted away from a specific implementation

I totally agree with your main point though that emulation is a broader topic than is generally thought.

Then Windows NT is emulating Win32.

Also, back in the day emulators emulated the CPU for sure, while an API implementation wasn't never called "emulation". Ever.

xterm calls itself an emulator in the manpage right now.