Star Trek Project - Overview

Overview

Star Trek was to be a version of the Macintosh operating system running as a GUI on Intel-compatible x86 personal computers on top of Novell's next in-development version of the DR DOS operating system in a similar fashion as Microsoft Windows 3.x would run on top of DOS (including DR DOS). (At that time, the Mac OS ran only on Apple's own computers based on the Motorola 68000 architecture.) The project was named after the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before."

The system was based on the successor of Digital Research's DR DOS 6.0 (BDOS level 6.7 and 7.1) and NetWare PalmDOS 1.0 (code named "Merlin", BDOS level 7.0), Novell's DR DOS "Panther" as a fully PC DOS compatible 16-bit disk operating system (with genuinely DOS compatible internal data structures) for bootstrapping, media access, device drivers and file system support. The system would utilize DR DOS' new "Vladivar" Extended DOS component with flat memory support, which had been under development at least since 1991. "Vladivar" (DEVICE=KRNL386.SYS aka DEVICE=EMM386.EXE /MULTI + TASKMGR) was a dynamically loadable 32-bit protected mode system core for advanced memory management, hardware virtualization, scheduling and domain management for pre-emptive multithreading within applications as well as multitasking of independent applications running in different virtual DOS machines (comparable to Windows 386 Enhanced Mode but without a GUI).

Thereby, the previously loaded DOS environment including all its device drivers became part of the system domain under the multitasker and unless specific protected mode virtual device drivers were loaded, hardware access got tunneled through this 16-bit sub-system by default. For maximum speed at minimum resource footprint the DR DOS BIOS, BDOS kernel, device drivers, memory managers and the multitasker were written in pure x86 assembly language. Apple's port of System 7.1 would run on top of this high-performance yet light-weight hybrid 32-bit/16-bit protected mode multitasking environment as a graphical system and shell in user space. Macintosh resource forks and long filenames were mapped onto the FAT12 and FAT16 file systems.

The developers eventually reached a point where they could boot an Intel 486 PC (with very specific hardware) into System 7.1, and on-screen it was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, every program needed to be ported to the new x86 architecture in order to run. Supposedly programs could be ported with little effort because Apple developed equivalent headers for x86.

The project was a joint development with Novell (although Apple provided the majority of engineers). Novell at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers, and the plan was that Novell would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows. However, the project was cancelled in mid-1993 because of political infighting, personnel issues, and the questionable marketability of such a project.