The project, starting in February 1992,[1] was conceived in collaboration between Apple Computer, who provided the majority of engineers, and Novell, who at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers.
[2] The impetus for the creation of the Star Trek project began out of Novell's desire to increase its competition against the monopoly of Microsoft and its DOS-based Windows products.
With shared concerns in the anti-competitive marketplace, Intel's CEO Andy Grove supported the two companies in launching their joint project Star Trek on February 14, 1992 (Valentine's Day).
[3] Apple set a deadline of October 31, 1992 (Halloween Day), promising the engineering team members a performance bonus of a large cash award and a vacation in Cancun, Mexico.
[5] Achieving their deadline goal and receiving their bonuses,[5] the developers eventually reached a point where they could boot an Intel 486 PC (with very specific hardware) into System 7.1, and its on-screen appearance was indistinguishable from a Mac.
[6] It was designed so that a user could think of it as a standalone application platform and general computing environment, in a concept similar to Microsoft's competing Windows 3.1x, running on top of DOS.
This was a radical and tedious departure both technologically and culturally, because at that time, the Macintosh system software had only ever officially run on Apple's own computers, which were all based on the Motorola 68000 architecture.
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.
[11][12][13] Microsoft Windows, ViewMAX 2 and 3, and PC/GEOS / NewDeal 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.
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 NeXTstep foundation.
[21] Comparing and contrasting with Apple's efforts, IBM had long since attempted a different strategy to provide the same essential goal of innovating a new software platform upon commodity hardware, while nondestructively preserving existing legacy installations of MS-DOS heritage.
Coincidentally, IBM had also code-named its OS/2 releases with Star Trek themes, and would eventually make such references integral to OS/2's public brand beginning with OS/2 Warp.
Apple and IBM have attempted several proprietary cross-platform collaborations, including the unreleased port of QuickTime to OS/2, the significant traction of the OpenDoc software framework, the AIM alliance, Kaleida Labs, and Taligent.
A corporation formerly known as ARDI developed a product called Executor, which can run a compatible selection of 68k Macintosh applications, and is hosted upon either the DOS or Linux operating systems on an 386-compatible CPU.