Apple may be now completing its transition to Intel processors -- witness this week's unveiled of the 17-inch MacBook Pro -- but this isn't the first time that such a move was considered. In the early 1990s, Apple and Novell entered an engineering partnership to create a version of the Mac OS that could run on PC hardware. The project was code-named Star Trek and the team was successful at getting a PC to boot into a modified version of the Mac OS. This was no small achievement at the time, because this was long before Mac OS X and the mach microkernel that could run on multiple processor families. However, changes in the management of both companies put an end to the project long before it could produce a commercial product.

Ironically, had Apple and Novell been successful, Star Trek could have produced a workable solution before the launch of Windows 95 -- and the past eleven years of computing might have been very different.

QuickTime -- Early proof Apple was more than a PC maker

Anyone today will tell you that Apple is more than just a computer maker, something that has been true for more than a decade. In the early Mac OS days, Apple needed a technology to display audio and video content on its hardware. The solution became known as QuickTime, a combination of graphics, audio and video formats and codecs that can be used to create, edit, view and convert any number of multimedia file types. Apple eventually made QuickTime an open standard that can be used on Mac and Windows computers. In recent years, Apple has gone even further, using QuickTime to help develop video standards such as MPEG 4. The adoption of QuickTime technology as part of a major media standard put Apple in a different sphere of the technology industry altogether (along with giving it revenues that had nothing to do with the Mac or the Apple II). Apple continued this pioneering approach with other technologies, including Firewire, which went on to become a major video technology and earned Apple an Emmy award for technical achievement.

The clone wars