Ernie Smith has the best article I’ve ever read about Apple’s near miss with Novell in 1992:
With the growing success of Novell NetWare and its acquisition of DR-DOS (later called Novell DOS), perhaps Novell was feeling nervous about the idea that Microsoft Windows would eventually dominate the market, harming its good-guy position in the industry. It was going around at the time, after all.
(It came out years later that Novell had plenty to worry about, as Microsoft had intentionally added a fake error into Windows that only appeared when using DR-DOS … at the behest of Bill Gates.)
Novell had a play, however: Use DR-DOS as the launching pad for a competing graphical user interface that could compete with Windows. The question? Which one. The answer? Surprisingly, MacOS.