Project Star Trek

Star Trek was the codename of a project to port System 7 to x86 computers.

The project was a collaboration between Apple and Novell, with support from Intel. It was launched in February 1992, and by the October 31 deadline, the team had managed to get System 7 booting on a 486 machine. Any existing Mac programs did not run, and would have to be ported individually.

The project was mired in political infighting and personnel issues. Many in the company did not believe it was a wise move. In 1993, Apple's CEO John Sculley was replaced with Michael Spindler, who was not supportive of the Star Trek concept. Instead, Spindler pushed for a migration to the new PowerPC platform. Consequently, Star Trek was cancelled, without ever turning into a commercial product.

However, not all was to waste: some technologies developed for Star Trek would be used in the aforementioned PowerPC migration, as well as in Novell DOS 7.