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. From its inception, Apple maintained a current internal port of the whole of Mac OS X to the x86 platform under the Marklar codename. On June 6, 2005, Apple announced that they would begin transitioning to x86-based Macs, and would complete this process by 2007.
See also
External links
- The secret weapon Apple threw away (http://www.geektimes.com/michael/techno/computing/hardware/products/apple/macintosh/misc/project-star-trek.html)
- vMac - The Virtual Macintosh Emulator Project (http://www.vmac.org/)
- The Official Basilisk II Home Page (http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html)
- PearPC - PowerPC Architecture Emulator (http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/)it:Progetto Star Trek