Star Trek project
- This article is about Project Star Trek of Apple Computer, Inc. There is a separate article about Star Trek, the science fiction media franchise.
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's slogan was "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before."
The developers eventually reached a point where they could boot a 486 PC into System 7, and on-screen it was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, the project was short-lived, cancelled in mid-1993 not because of technical or hardware compatibility issues, but because of political infighting and other personnel issues.
Although a direct x86 port was never released, one can run the classic Mac OS on non-Mac computers through a method known as
emulation. Two of the more popular Macintosh emulators are vMac and Basilisk II, both written by third parties. Because emulators are constantly translating
CPU instructions, they are inherently slower than an equivalent piece of native software. By the time these emulators were developed, Apple no longer saw an x86 port as a useful strategy. As of May 2004 an early version of an x86-native emulator called
PearPC is available which emulates a
PowerPC, albeit extremely slowly, and can boot and run Mac
OS X
Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to run
Apple Darwin, the
Unix-based core of
Mac OS X, on the x86 platform, by virtue of its
open source nature (
Apple Public Source License). However, driver support is very limited, and much of the remainder of the operating system supports only the
PowerPC architecture. Also, the OS X
graphical user interface, named
Aqua, is proprietary and is not included with the x86 port of Darwin.
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