Star Trek is thecode name that was given to a secretprototype project, running a port ofMacintosh System 7 and its applications onIntel-compatiblex86personal computers. The project, starting in February 1992,[1] was conceived in collaboration betweenApple Computer, who provided the majority of engineers, andNovell, who at the time was one of the leaders ofcross-platform file-servers. The plan was that Novell would market the resultingOS as a challenge toMicrosoft Windows, but the project was discontinued in 1993 and never released, although components were reused in other projects. The project was named after theStar Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before".[2]
The impetus for the creation of the Star Trek project began out of Novell's desire to increase its competition against the monopoly ofMicrosoft and itsDOS-based Windows products.[3] While Microsoft was eventually convicted many years later of illegal monopoly status, Novell had called Microsoft's presence "predatory" and theUS Department of Justice had called it "exclusionary" and "unlawful".[4] Novell's first idea to extend its desktop presence with a graphical computing environment was to adaptDigital Research'sGEM desktop environment, but Novell's legal department rejected this due to apprehension of a possible legal response from Apple, so the company went directly to Apple. With shared concerns in the anti-competitive marketplace, Intel's CEOAndy Grove supported the two companies in launching their joint project Star Trek on February 14, 1992 (Valentine's Day).[3]
Apple set a deadline of October 31, 1992 (Halloween Day), promising the engineering team members a performance bonus of a large cash award and a vacation inCancun, Mexico. Of the project, team member Fred Monroe later reflected, "We worked like dogs. It was some of the most fun I've had working".[5]
Achieving their deadline goal and receiving their bonuses,[5] the developers eventually reached a point where they could boot an Intel486 PC (with very specific hardware) into System 7.1, and its on-screen appearance was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, every program would then need to be ported to the new x86 architecture to run.[6] It was to sit on top of a then upcoming release ofDR DOS and it was noted that programs would have to berecompiled.[7]The tagline for the project was "to boldly go where no Mac has gone before", whichComputerworld mocked with the comment "the OS that boldly goes where everyone else has been".[citation needed]
However, the project was canceled in mid-1993 because of political infighting, personnel issues, and the questionable marketability[6] of such a project. Apple's side of the project had seen the exit of a supportive CEO,John Sculley, in favor of a new CEO,Michael Spindler. Spindler was not interested in the project, instead reallocating most software engineering resources towardPower Macintosh, the company's ongoing migration to the competingPowerPC architecture. While Apple came close to releasingRhapsody in 1998 on x86 systems, even going so far as to ship a developer release for Intel hardware,[8][9] noMacintosh operating systems launched natively on Intel hardware until the official transition ofMac OS X in 2006.[3]
All the MBAs in the world can't convince us it’s a good model.
— Roger Heinen, Manager of Mac software architecture,
on the objectives of Star Trek in March 1992[5]: 179
Star Trek was designed as a hybrid of Apple'sMacintoshoperating system, made to run as anoperating system GUI shell application upon Novell's next in-development version of theDR DOS operating system.[6] It was designed so that a user could think of it as a standalone application platform and general computing environment, in a concept similar to Microsoft's competingWindows 3.1x, running on top of DOS. This was a radical and tedious departure both technologically and culturally, because at that time, the Macintosh system software had only ever officially run on Apple's own computers, which were all based on theMotorola 68000 architecture.
The system was built on the successor ofDigital Research's DR DOS 6.0 (BDOS level 6.7 and 7.1) and NetWarePalmDOS 1.0 (code named "Merlin", BDOS level 7.0), Novell's DR DOS "Panther" as a fully PC DOS compatible16-bit disk operating system (with genuinely DOS compatible internal data structures) forbootstrapping, media access,device drivers andfile system support. The system would utilize DR DOS's new "Vladivar" Extended DOS component withflat memory support, which had been under development since 1991.[nb 1] "Vladivar" (DEVICE=KRNL386.SYS[10] akaDEVICE=EMM386.EXE /MULTI +TASKMGR)[11] was a dynamically loadable32-bit[6]protected mode system core for advancedmemory management, hardwarevirtualization,scheduling and domain management forpre-emptivemultithreading within applications as well asmultitasking of independent applications running in differentvirtual DOS machines (comparable toWindows 386 Enhanced Mode but without aGUI).[11]
Thereby, the previously loaded DOS environment including all its device drivers became part of the system domain under the multitasker.[11] Unless specific protected modevirtual device drivers were loaded, hardware access got tunneled through this 16-bit sub-system by default. For maximum speed at minimum resource footprint, the DR DOSBIOS, BDOSkernel, device drivers, memory managers and the multitasker were written in pure x86assembly language. Apple's port ofSystem 7.1 would run on top of this high-performance yet light-weight hybrid 32-bit/16-bit protected mode multitasking environment as a graphical system and shell inuser space. Macintoshresource forks andlong filenames weremapped onto theFAT12 andFAT16 file systems.[citation needed]
Though the joint effort had been canceled, Novell published the long-awaitedDR DOS 7.0 asNovell DOS 7 (BDOS 7.2) in 1994. Besides many other additions in the areas of advanced memory and disk management and networking, Novell DOS 7 provided all of Novell's underlying "STDOS" components of the DR DOS Panther and Vladivar projects except for the graphical Star Trek component itself, which had been jointly developed by Apple and Novell. Instead, TASKMGR provides a text mode interface to the underlying multitasker inEMM386, but the system also provides anAPI to allow third-party GUIs to take control.[11][12][13]Microsoft Windows,ViewMAX 2 and3, andPC/GEOS /NewDeal are known to utilize this interface, when run on Novell DOS 7 (or its successorsOpenDOS 7.01 or DR-DOS 7.02 and higher), and Star Trek would have been yet another one.[13] In fact, some additional hooks had been implemented specifically for the Star Trek GUI forframe buffer access. These hooks have never been stripped out of EMM386 but just left undocumented.[12]
Apple reused some of the platform abstraction technology developed for Star Trek, incorporating it into the concurrently developedmigration to thePowerPC architecture. This abstraction technology includes the capability of loading the MacintoshROM data from a file instead of from a ROM chip.[citation needed] Loading the Mac OS ROM file was first used in the original iMac as a CHRPNew World ROM system.
Former Star Trek team members Fred Monroe and Fred Huxham formed the company Fredlabs, Inc. In January 1997, the company released VirtualMac, a Mac OS application compatibility virtual machine forBeOS.[5]: 180
In August 1994, Apple announced another partnership with Novell, this time to port itsnetwork operating systemNetWare to run onPower Macintosh servers. However, the project did not exit the testing phase, and was quietly cancelled in October 1995.[14][15]
Sculley said in 2003 that not choosing Intel for Apple was "probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made".[16]
Apple's first and quickly aborted concept of porting its flagship operating system to Intel systems was in 1985, following the exit ofSteve Jobs. Apple did not reattempt this effort until Star Trek, and did not launch such a product until 2006.[3]
Apple has actually shipped products based upon the concept of hybridizing System 7 into ashell application platform. It was accomplished in the form of thestartmac process and other hybridized applications launched atop its UNIX-basedA/UX system. It was also accomplished in the form of theMacintosh Application Environment (MAE), which was the functional equivalent of Star Trek plus an embedded68k emulator (as was the case with System 7 for Power Macintosh), running as an application for Solaris andHP/UX. Apple also delivered its "DOS compatible" models of Macs, which is a hybridized Mac with aconcurrently functional Intel coprocessor card inside. System 7 and later have always had DOS filesystem compatibility.[17]
Although a direct x86 port of the classic Mac OS was never released to the public, determined users could make Apple's retail OS run upon non-Mac computers throughemulation. The development of these emulation environments was said to have been inspired by the initiative shown in the Star Trek project.[citation needed] Two of the more popular 68k Macintosh emulators arevMac andBasilisk II, and a PowerPC Macintosh emulator isSheepShaver; each are written by third parties.
Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to natively runDarwin, theUnix-based core ofMac OS X, on the x86 platform by virtue of itsNeXTstep foundation.[18] This port was widely available because Darwin wasopen source under theApple Public Source License. However, the Mac OS Xgraphical user interface, namedAqua, was proprietary. It was not included with Darwin, which depended on otherwindow managers running onX11 for graphical interfaces, and thus most commercial Mac OS applications cannot run natively on Darwin alone.
Apple ran a similar project to Star Trek for Mac OS X, calledMarklar,[19][20][21][22][23] later referred to by Steve Jobs as having been the "secret double life" of the publicly PowerPC-only Mac OS.[18] This project was to retainOPENSTEP's x86 port, keeping Mac OS X and all supporting applications (includingiLife andXcode) running on the x86 architecture as well as that of the PowerPC. Marklar was publicly revealed by Apple's CEOSteve Jobs in June 2005 when he announced the Macintoshtransition to Intel processors starting in 2006.[24]
Comparing and contrasting with Apple's efforts,IBM had long since attempted a different strategy to provide the same essential goal of innovating a new software platform upon commodity hardware, while nondestructively preserving existing legacy installations of MS-DOS heritage. However, its strategy was based upon itsOS/2 operating system, which had long since achieved seamlessbackward compatibility with DOS applications. In 1992, roughly coinciding with the timeframe of the Star Trek project, IBM devised a new and fundamentally integral subsystem for backward compatibility withWindows 3.0 andWindows 3.1 applications. This new subsystem for OS/2, calledWin-OS/2, was integrated beginning with OS/2 2.0. Although conceived through different legacy business requirements and cultures, Win-OS/2 was designed with similar software engineering objectives and virtualization techniques as was Star Trek. Coincidentally, IBM had also code-named its OS/2 releases withStar Trek themes, and would eventually make such references integral to OS/2's public brand beginning withOS/2 Warp.
Apple and IBM have attempted several proprietary cross-platform collaborations, including the unreleased port ofQuickTime to OS/2, the significant traction of theOpenDocsoftware framework, theAIM alliance,Kaleida Labs, andTaligent. Both companies have utilized actual personnel from the Star Trek television and movie franchise for promotional purposes.
A corporation formerly known as ARDI developed a product calledExecutor, which can run a compatible selection of 68k Macintosh applications, and is hosted upon either the DOS orLinux operating systems on an386-compatible CPU. Executor is acleanroom reimplementation of theMacintosh Toolbox and versions 6 and 7 of the operating system, and an integrated 68k CPU emulator called Syn68k.[5]: 182 [25] Liken from Andataco, forSun andHPworkstations, emulates the Macintosh hardware environment including the 68k CPU, upon which the user must install System 6.0.7. Quorum Software Systems made two apps targeting UNIX workstations: Equal providesbinary compatibility by emulating the Mac APIs and 68k CPU, to put each precertified Mac app into its own X window, on Sun andSGI workstations; Latitude provides asource code porting layer with a Display Postscript driver.[26][27]
Caldera admits paragraph 27, excerpt as follows: Discussions with Apple regarding the "Star Trek" project began in February or March 1992. Deposition of Toby Corey ("Corey Dep.") at 44, Record Support, v.3 to Consolidated Statement of Facts.
Ultimately, Star Trek will sport a comprehensive list of features, such as compound document support and system wide scripting, that are part of a broader Apple strategy to create a common, multiplatform software environment called Companion. […] Star Trek will run DOS and recompiled Macintosh applications, according to sources familiar with the plans, but it is not clear whether it will run Windows applications in its first release.
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