Star Trek project

Star Trek was the code name given to a prototype project at Apple Computer during 1992 and 1993. Star Trek was to be a version of the Macintosh operating system which ran on Intel-compatible x86 personal computers (at that time, the Mac OS ran only on Apple's own computers based on the Motorola 68000 architecture). The project was named after the "Star Trek" science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before"."

The developers eventually reached a point where they could boot an Intel 486 PC (with very specific hardware) into System 7, and on-screen it was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, "every" program needed to be ported to the new x86 architecture in order to run. Supposedly programs could be ported with little effort because Apple developed equivalent headers for x86.

The project was a joint development with Novell (although Apple provided the majority of engineers). Novell at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers, and the plan was that Novell would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows. However, the project was cancelled in mid-1993 because of political infighting, personnel issues, and the questionable marketability of such a project.

Legacies

Although a direct "x"86 port was never released to the public, one could run the classic Mac OS on non-Mac computers through emulation and the development of these was spurred by the failure of the Star Trek project.Fact|date=February 2007 Two of the more popular Macintosh emulators are vMac and Basilisk II, both written by third parties.

Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to natively run Darwin, the Unix-based core of Mac OS X, on the x86 platform by virtue of its NeXTstep foundation. This port was widely available because Darwin was open source under the Apple Public Source License. However, the OS X graphical user interface, named Aqua, was proprietary. It was not included with Darwin, which depended on other window managers running on X11 for graphical interfaces.

Apple ran a similar project to Star Trek for Mac OS X, called Marklar. This project was to keep Mac OS X and all supporting applications (including iLife and Xcode) running on the x86 architecture as well as that of the PowerPC. Marklar was revealed by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs in June 2005, when he announced the Macintosh transition to Intel processors starting in 2006.

See also

* Apple Intel transition
* OSx86

External links

* [http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/6.html Quest for the Operating System] Star Trek from Kernelthread
* [http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/0613.html Star Trek: Apple's First Mac OS on Intel Project] from Low End Mac