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> Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS!

Seriously?

I believe it is a reference to the infamous Star Trek project. I did not know of the Digital Research connection, but it sounds like it was another one of those collaborations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

The funny thing is, the industry knew that collaboration would be necessary back then, but it took open source models for it to become effective. (I guess direct business to business agreements made competitors to dependent upon each other.)

(author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up being analogously the same thing.

The biggest problem with Star Trek was that it didn't run existing Mac software, and you couldn't emulate the 68k ISA reasonably on x86 at the time. The key piece of Mac OS X on Intel a decade later was translation software for PowerPC binaries, so that your existing software still worked.

I've always hoped that, since it was actually demoed, a copy still exists somewhere in the wild – even if it'll only boot the Finder...

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