Legacies
While the joint effort failed, Novell published the long awaited "DR DOS 7.0" as Novell 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 provided a text mode interface to the underlying multitasker in EMM386, but the system also provided an API to allow third-party GUIs to take over control. Microsoft Windows, ViewMAX/2 & 3 and PC/GEOS / New Deal are known to utilize this interface, when run on Novell DOS 7 (or its successors OpenDOS 7.01 or DR-DOS 7.02 and higher), and "Star Trek" would have been yet another one. 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.
Although a direct x86 port of Mac OS was never released to the public, one could run the classic Mac OS on non-Mac computers through emulation and the development of these was spurred by the failure of the Star Trek project. Two of the more popular Macintosh emulators are vMac and Basilisk II, both written by third parties.
Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to natively run Darwin, the Unix-based core of OS X, on the x86 platform by virtue of its NeXTstep foundation. This port was widely available because Darwin was open source under the Apple Public Source License. However, the OS X graphical user interface, named Aqua, was proprietary. It was not included with Darwin, which depended on other window managers running on X11 for graphical interfaces.
Apple ran a similar project to Star Trek for Mac OS X, called Marklar. This project 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.
In 1993, IBM tried a similar approach and released the OS/2 For Windows, consisting in the OS/2 graphical interface, Workplace Shell, running at the top of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, without disk partition, format and dualboot. Although used OS/2 name, the system was not a true OS/2 operating system and not capable to run native OS/2 applications but a rather GUI at the top of Windows.
Read more about this topic: Star Trek Project
Famous quotes containing the word legacies:
“The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (20th century)