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The secret weapon Apple threw away
Deep-cover project ran Mac OS on Intel processors

Published: Nov. 1, 1997

Jodi Mardesich
Mercury News Staff Writer
©1996-7 San Jose Mercury News. Reprinted without permission.

Five years ago, a stealth group of engineers from Apple Computer Inc. and Novell Inc. took on a challenge many thought impossible: to make the Macintosh operating system run on Intel Corp. processors.

They raced toward a prototype deadline of Halloween 1992. They made it, but in mid-1993, the project -- dubbed Star Trek -- was killed by political infighting. Today, having lost five crucial years, struggling Apple is again thought to be moving toward Intel processors.

Thursday evening, the group reunited to reminisce and to contemplate what might have been. If Apple had upstaged Microsoft's Windows 95 with a Mac OS for Intel computers, would Microsoft software now control nearly 90 percent of all PCs?

All the Trekkies have left to show of the project is an old hard disk drive with the still-operable code; a postmortem video; an outdated business plan; a technical manual; and the traditional project T-shirt, with its Star Trek ``communicator'' emblem on the front and, on the back, a depiction of a crazed guy gouging his eyes out with a pencil.

And they have their memories.

They began in the summer of 1992, when a group of four from Novell and 14 from Apple quietly moved into a building facing Intel Corp.'s Santa Clara headquarters. Each was supplied an office, a Mac, and a PC donated by Intel. To this day, few outsiders have known of the group's existence.

For the engineers, the lure was a technically challenging project. For Mark Gonzales, a Harvard MBA freshly back from a rejuvenating sabbatical, it was a risky but potentially revolutionary project. ``We weren't sure if it was a good idea to run on Intel,'' said Fred Huxham, who left Apple in 1995. ``Mark had these grand plans. He thought people would at some point buy a new OS, and it could be Star Trek.''

For Fred Monroe, working on the project was a heady experience. At 22, just out of college, he got to travel to Japan and to show the software to future Apple CEO Michael Spindler and a top NEC Corp. executive. Because he was so young, he felt he had something to prove.

``We worked like dogs. It was some of the most fun I've had working,'' said Monroe, co-founder with Huxham of FredLabs Inc., a software company in San Francisco.

Because they made their Halloween deadline -- having completed a prototype in just three months -- they got bonuses of $15,000 to $25,000 and were sent, on Apple's dime, to Cancun.

In December 1992, a few team members showed Apple's board their top-secret project and got an immediate OK to continue.

Novell executives, hoping for a weapon to blunt Microsoft's growing dominance in the computer industry, were stunned at the progress. Darrell Miller, a former Novell vice president, kept exclaiming, ``I can't believe it,'' Huxham said. ``He was going nuts.''

In the end, it wasn't technical difficulties that derailed the project. It was internal politics, especially the loss of key backers.

Star Trek's biggest supporters were Roger Heinen, an Apple vice president hired away by Microsoft in the middle of the project, and John Sculley, Apple's CEO, who was forced out not long after. At the time, Apple was switching its software from the Motorola 68000 processor to the PowerPC, and executives were concerned that bifurcating their efforts could sink both projects.

There were a few other roadblocks: Apple tried to persuade computer makers to include the operating system on their PCs, but found resistance. Gonzales, the project manager, and a few others took the software on the road.

They stopped at Dell Computer in Texas, where they showed Star Trek to founder Michael Dell. Dell was impressed, but told Gonzales bluntly that unless it was free, Dell wouldn't be able to use the promising operating system because Dell was paying Microsoft for its Windows OS for each computer his company shipped, regardless of whether the computer shipped with Windows.

They also would have had to convince applications software developers to rework their applications so they could run on the new system. Huxham maintains this task wouldn't have been too time-consuming.

``There were definitely some tricky problems left, still,'' Huxham said. ``I still believe we could have finished and it would have been interesting, if nothing else.''

If they had kept to their schedule, the developers figure they could have beaten Windows 95 to the market by a year.

After the dinner Thursday, Huxham hooked up his Intel 486-based computer to an Apple monitor and turned it on. While going through the boot-up process, the system kept hitting snags. One particularly ominous error message flashed: ``Missing Operating System.''

``I thought that's what we did,'' one of the Trekkies said in dismay.

After several attempts, Huxham's magic worked: The computer played the familiar chord that signals the Mac starting. The smiling Mac graced the PC's screen.

A mouse click later, these words appeared: ``Star Trek: Boldly Going Where No Mac Has Gone Before.'' Or since.