I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.

And those guys are all getting up there in years.

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MBCook an hour ago | parent [-]

Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.

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CharlesW 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways)…

For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (see page 28)

	▲	MBCook 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful. But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.

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hedgehog 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be sort of interesting, but would it be a lot different from the CHRP version?

Edit: Yes, and I was never aware of Novell's part in all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#Architecture