Star Trek project

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This article is about Apple Computer's Project Star Trek. If you intended to reach the article about the science fiction TV series Star Trek, click here.

Project Star Trek was the code name given to a prototype project Apple Computer worked on during 1992-93. The ultimate goal of project Star Trek was to successfully port the MacOS operating system to Intel-compatible x86 personal computers.

However, the project was short-lived. In mid-1993, only a year after it started, project Star Trek was cancelled -- not because of technical or hardware incompatibility issues, but because of political infighting and other personnel issues.

Although a direct x86 port of the classic MacOS was never released, it later did become possible to run the classic MacOS on non-Mac computers through a method known as emulation. Two of the more popular Macintosh emulators are vMac and Basilisk II.

Ten years after the start of 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 (Most commonly called "Aqua") is not included in the x86 port of Darwin.

Historical reference

It is believed that the project was code named "Star Trek" as a reference to the fact that an Apple Macintosh made an appearance in .

External links

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