[GEM Development] Fw: [Geos-Talk] From the annals of history: the Star Trek project; or System 7 on the PC

[Liam Proven]

On 8 October 2011 00:22, Thomas Clayton <topcatdrc at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> ALL,
>
> This is from my "Other GE:" environment, GEOS (now owned by Breadbox). I do not remember forwarding this onward, at the time it came to me, so I'm doing that, now. Finding the earlier this year letter(s) about bitsavers.org got me to sorting through my e-mail.
>
> Tom Clayton
> BTW,
> http://www.breadbox.com
>
> --- On Sun, 5/22/11, Raymond Ancog <rayancog at pldtdsl.net> wrote:
>
> From: Raymond Ancog <rayancog at pldtdsl.net>
> Subject: [Geos-Talk] From the annals of history: the Star Trek project; or System 7 on the PC
> To: geos-talk at yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, May 22, 2011, 2:59 AM
>
>
>
> While browsing through Wikipedia on DR-DOS (which worked great with
> PC/GEOS, I came across an an interesting section and found this:
>
> Star Trek project
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
>
> Star Trek was the code name given to a prototype project at Apple
> Computer and Novell during 1992 and 1993. The project was named after
> the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go
> where no Mac has gone before."
> 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.)
>
> Skipping down, the article reads:
>
> 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 underlaying "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 underlaying multitasker in EMM386, but the system
> also provided an API to allow 3rd 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.
>
> Remember how I'd occasionally post about my musings that Apple and
> Geoworks had in fact ported the Mac OS UI to PC/GEOS 1.x but never
> commercially released it and might have used it for a DOS version of
> ClarisWorks with Geos as the runtime GUI, like AOL?

That's fascinating. Thanks for that. I knew about the project but that
is more technical detail than I have ever heard before.

--
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508