Star Trek project
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- This article is about Project Star Trek, an internal code name used for a project of Apple Computer, Inc. For the science fiction media franchise, see Star Trek.
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 an Intel 486 PC (within very specific hardware) into System 7, and on-screen it was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, the project was short-lived, cancelled in mid-1993 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 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. PearPC emulates a PowerPC, and can boot and run Mac OS X. It doesn't have much speed, but is gradually getting faster. It now emulates a PowerPC G4 processor instead of a G3.
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 open source 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.
Apple ran a similar project to Star Trek for Mac OS X. This project was code-named Marklar. Marklar's task 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.