This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Maury Markowitz (talk | contribs) at 14:49, 4 June 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 14:49, 4 June 2002 by Maury Markowitz (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)NEXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NeXTSTEP 1.0 was released in 1989 after several previews dating back as far as 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995. By that point NeXT had turned to OpenStep.
The system had originally started in the mid-1980's as two projects, an effort that would create Display PostScript, and an effort to build a "toolkit" of programming objects for the education market. When it became clear that the computers and operating systems of the day were not up to the task of running either, the projects were combined, along with a hardware effort, and eventually created the NeXT computers.
NEXTSTEP was a combination of several parts:
- a UNIX-like operating system based on the Mach kernel
- display PostScript and a windowing engine
- an object-oriented application layer, including several "kits"
- development tools for the OO layers
The key to NEXTSTEP was the last items, the OO libraries and their associated tools. These offered increadible power, and were also used to build all of the software on the machine. Due to several features of the Objective-C language, writing applications with NEXTSTEP was far easier than on competing systems (even today), and the system is often pointed to as the paragon of computer development even a decade later.
As the market for the computer itself dried up with the increasing power of the Intel CPUs, NeXT started an effort to port the entire system to the Intel platform. This was delivered in NEXTSTEP 3.1 in 1993, known as NeXTSTEP/Intel (sometimes NeXTSTEP 486), running alongside the newly re-named NeXTSTEP/NeXT on the black boxes. At this point hardware production was stopped and the company became NeXT Software Inc.
Additional kits were added to the product line to make the system more attractive. This included PDO which allowed the easyist remote invocation system you can imagine, and EnterpriseObjects, a powerful object-relational database system. These kits made the system particularily interesting to the custom applications programmers, and NEXTSTEP had a long history in the financial programming world.
With Apple Computer's acquisition of NeXT in 1997, Apple took over development of NeXTSTEP (Apple's spelling restored the small "e"), and (after several stumbles) was reborn as Mac OS X. Mac OS X's NeXTSTEP heritage can be seen in the Cocoa development environment, where the Objective-C library objects have "NS" prefixes!
See also:
External links: A complete guide to the confusing series of names applied to the system
This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.