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NeXTSTEP

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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 format of the name had many camel case variants, and became NEXTSTEP (all capitals) only at the end of its life. The format most commonly used by "insiders" is NeXTSTEP.

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:

  1. a UNIX-like operating system based on the Mach kernel with source code from BSD Unix from UC Berkeley
  2. display PostScript and a windowing engine
  3. the Objective-C language and runtime
  4. an object-oriented application layer, including several "kits"
  5. development tools for the OO layers

The key to NeXTSTEP's fame were the last three items. They offered increadible power, and were 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.

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 and (after several stumbles) it was reborn in 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.