Star Trek project

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Star Trek is the

Apple Computer, who provided the majority of engineers, and Novell, who at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers. The plan was that Novell would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows, but the project was discontinued in 1993 and never released, although components were reused in other projects. The project was named after the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before".[2]

History

The impetus for the creation of the Star Trek project began out of Novell's desire to increase its competition against the monopoly of

Andy 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 in Cancun, 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,

DR DOS and it was noted that programs would have to be recompiled.[7]
The tagline for the project was "to boldly go where no Mac has gone before", which Computerworld 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

Mac 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 

Architecture

Star Trek was designed as a hybrid of Apple's

Windows 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 the Motorola 68000
architecture.

The system was built on the successor of

GUI).[11]

Thereby, the previously loaded DOS environment including all its device drivers became part of the

FAT16 file systems.[citation needed
]

Legacy

Though the joint effort had been canceled, Novell published the long-awaited

OpenDOS 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 for frame 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 developed migration to the PowerPC architecture. This abstraction technology includes the capability of loading the Macintosh ROM 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 CHRP New 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 for BeOS.[5]: 180 

Similar concepts

Within Apple

Apple's first and quickly aborted concept of porting its flagship operating system to Intel systems was in 1985, following the exit of Steve 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 a

shell application platform. It was accomplished in the form of the startmac process and other hybridized applications launched atop its UNIX-based A/UX system. It was also accomplished in the form of the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), which was the functional equivalent of Star Trek plus an embedded 68k emulator (as was the case with System 7 for Power Macintosh), running as an application for Solaris and HP/UX. Apple also delivered its "DOS compatible" models of Macs, which is a hybridized Mac with a concurrently functional Intel coprocessor card inside. System 7 and later have always had DOS filesystem compatibility.[14]

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 through emulation. 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 are vMac and Basilisk II, and a PowerPC Macintosh emulator is SheepShaver; each are written by third parties.

Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to natively run

X11
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, called

OPENSTEP's x86 port, keeping 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 publicly revealed by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs in June 2005 when he announced the Macintosh transition to Intel processors starting in 2006.[21]

Within IBM

Comparing and contrasting with Apple's efforts,

OS/2 Warp
.

Apple and IBM have attempted several proprietary cross-platform collaborations, including the unreleased port of

AIM alliance, Kaleida Labs, and Taligent
. Both companies have utilized actual personnel from the Star Trek television and movie franchise for promotional purposes.

Further information: OS/2 § 1994–1996: The "Warp" years

Others

A corporation formerly known as ARDI developed a product called Executor, which can run a compatible selection of 68k Macintosh applications, and is hosted upon either the DOS or Linux operating systems on an 386-compatible CPU. Executor is a cleanroom reimplementation of the Macintosh Toolbox and versions 6 and 7 of the operating system, and an integrated 68k CPU emulator called Syn68k.[5]: 182 [22] Liken from Andataco, for Sun and HP workstations, 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 provides binary compatibility by emulating the Mac APIs and 68k CPU, to put each precertified Mac app into its own X window, on Sun and SGI workstations; Latitude provides a source code porting layer with a Display Postscript driver.[23][24]

See also

Notes

  1. DR DOS "Panther"
    has copyright strings "1991,1992".

References

  1. Caldera, Inc. (1999-04-19). "Caldera's consolidated response to Microsoft's motions for partial summary judgement on plaintiff's claims of "predisclosure", "perceived incompatibilities," and "intentional incompatibilities"" (court deposition). paragraph 27. Archived from the original
    on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2013-03-21. 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.
  2. ^ Mardesich, Jodi (1997-11-01). "The secret weapon Apple threw away - Deep-cover project ran Mac OS on Intel processors". San Jose Mercury News. Archived from the original on 2021-03-02. Retrieved 2022-01-01. [1]
  3. ^ a b c d Hormby, Tom (2014-04-27). "Star Trek: Apple's First Mac OS on Intel Project". Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  4. Caldera, Inc. (1996-07-24). "Caldera sues Microsoft for Antitrust practices alleges monopolistic acts shut its DR DOS operating system out of market". Archived
    from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  5. ^
    OCLC 245921029. Retrieved 2013-03-31. [2]
  6. ^
    PC Week. Archived
    from the original on 2017-08-05. Retrieved 2017-08-05. 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.
  7. MacWorld
    . Vol. 7, no. 12. 1993-03-22.
  8. ^ "Mac OS X Rhapsody". WinWorldPC. 2022 [2015]. Archived from the original on 2022-01-27. Retrieved 2022-01-28.
  9. ^ "Rhapsody 5.1 for Intel". Shaw's Rhapsody Resource Page. 2022 [2007]. Archived from the original on 2022-01-13. Retrieved 2022-01-28.
  10. ISBN 978-0-201-63287-3. (xviii+856+vi pages, 3.5"-floppy) Errata: [3][4]
  11. ^
    Caldera, Inc. (August 1997). OpenDOS Developer's Reference Series — Multitasking API — Programmer's Guide. UK. Caldera Part No. 200-DODG-004. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2013-03-21.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  12. ^
    Brown, Ralf D. (2002-12-29). "The x86 Interrupt List". Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (61 ed.). Retrieved 2012-01-14. See also: Ralf Brown's Interrupt List
  13. ^ a b Paul, Matthias R. (2002-02-24) [2002-02-21]. "GEOS/NDO info for RBIL62?". Newsgroup: comp.os.geos.programmer. Archived from the original on 2019-04-20. Retrieved 2019-04-20.
  14. ^ "Macintosh: DOS, OS/2, and Windows Compatibility". March 1993. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2013-03-23.
  15. ^ a b Caulfield, Brian (2010-01-26). "Steve Jobs' Frenemies". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2017-09-21. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  16. ^ Rose, Michael (2012-06-10). "How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy". Engadget. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  17. ^ Kim, Arnold (2012-06-10). "A Bit of History Behind the Mac OS X on Intel Project". Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  18. ^ dePlume, Nick (2002-08-30). "Apple Keeps x86 Torch Lit with Marklar". Archived from the original on 2018-08-27. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  19. ^ Covestor (2012-06-10). "The amazing origin of Apple on Intel - Smarter Investing". Smarter Investing. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  20. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (2012-06-11). "Insider cuts into Apple, peels off Intel Mac OS X port secrets - Project Marklar was a one-man skunkworks". The Register. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  21. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (2005-06-06). "Apple to announce Intel 'Switch' - WSJ - WWDC to detail migration strategy". The Register. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  22. ^ "ARDI.com". Archived from the original on 2013-08-15. Retrieved 2013-03-21.
  23. ISSN 1090-7017. Archived from the original on 2018-08-27. Retrieved 2017-09-21. [5]
  24. ^ Hayes, Frank (January 1994). "Personality Plus". Byte. Archived from the original on 2006-05-10. Retrieved 2017-09-20.

Further reading

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