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.)