NeXTSTEP & The NeXT Computer

OS X and UNIX

• Where did Mac OS X come from?
• Why does OS X have so much in common with other UNIX operating systems like Linux?
• The answer to both is NeXTSTEP

Quick Backstory

• In 1985, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and decided to start a new computer company, NeXT, Inc.
• From 1985-1996, NeXT created several different computers:
  • the NeXT Computer
  • the NeXTcube
  • the NeXTstation
• Also created an operating system called NeXTSTEP

NeXT Computer

• intended for educational use
• sold to universities, financial institutions, and government agencies
• Integrated digital signal processor
• 8 Megabytes of RAM
• Early models sold for $6500 (around $13000 in 2015 dollars)

NeXTSTEP

• Proprietary OS built on top of BSD (a UNIX OS)
• Pioneered many modern user interface features
  • the Dock
  • the spinning pinwheel
  • full-color icons for programs
  • scrollable, draggable windows
  • the "X" close button
• written in C/Objective-C

Cool Facts

• Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server, CERN httpd, and the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, on a NeXT computer running NeXTSTEP
• Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, and Quake were all developed on NeXT computers
• The first "app store", the Electronic AppWrapper, was developed for NeXTSTEP

Becoming OS X

• NeXT was never very commercially profitable, and by 1993, they stopped producing hardware entirely
• In 1996, Apple bought NeXT. NeXTSTEP was eventaully used as the basis for Mac OS X, and its library/API OpenStep became Cocoa, a framework that is still used today in OS X and iOS
• This is why OS X is a UNIX operating system
• If you look at Cocoa classes, many of them start with NS, for NeXTSTEP