NEXTSTEP

NEXTSTEP graphical user interface
Company/ developer:	NeXT
OS family:	Unix-like
Source model:	Closed source
Latest stable release:	3.3 / 1995
Kernel type:	Hybrid kernel
License:	Proprietary
Working state:	Historic

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 on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 family processors (specifically the original black boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC. About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1152x900, 215 KB)== ron bums ==Bold text MICROSOFT OWNZ J00 RON BUMS File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... This article or section needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ... The term software company could be applied to; a) a company that produces software or b) a company that distributes software from a third party or c) a company that provides services for software. ... A software developer is a programmer who is concerned with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming. ... NeXT was a computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured two computer workstations during its existence, the NeXTcube and NeXTstation. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... The text below is generated by a template, which has been proposed for deletion. ... 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A kernel connects the software and hardware of a computer. ... Graphical overview of a hybrid kernel Hybrid kernels are essentially microkernels that have some non-essential machine code in the kernel address space in order for that code to run more quickly than it would were it to be in user space. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. ... An object-oriented operating system is an operating system which internally uses object-oriented methodologies. ... In computing, multitasking is a method by which multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... NeXT was a computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured two computer workstations during its existence, the NeXTcube and NeXTstation. ... September 18 is the 261st day of the year (262nd in leap years). ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is an American international communications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. ... The Motorola 680x0, 0x0, m68k, or 68k family of CISC microprocessor CPU chips were 32_bit from the start, and were the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ... The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... PA-RISC is a microprocessor architecture developed by Hewlett-Packards Systems & VLSI Technology Operation. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The OPENSTEP desktop. ...

On February 4, 1997 Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, using the OpenStep operating system as the basis for Mac OS X.^[1] Traces of the NEXTSTEP/OpenStep heritage can still be seen in Mac OS X; for example, in the Cocoa development environment, the Objective-C library classes have "NS" prefixes, and the HISTORY section of the manual page for the defaults command in Mac OS X straightforwardly states that the command "First appeared in NeXTStep." A free software implementation of the OpenStep standard, GNUstep, also exists. February 4 is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... Mac OS X (IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ... A Cocoa application being developed using Xcode. ... Objective-C, often referred to as ObjC or more seldomly as Objective C or Obj-C, is an object oriented programming language implemented as an extension to C. It is used primarily on Mac OS X and GNUstep, two environments based on the OpenStep standard, and is the primary language... This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ... GNUstep is a free software implementation of NeXTs OpenStep Objective-C libraries (called frameworks), widget toolkit, and application development tools not only for Unix-like operating systems, but also for Microsoft Windows. ...

Description

NEXTSTEP was a combination of several parts:

• a Unix-like operating system based on the Mach kernel, plus source code from UC Berkeley's BSD Unix
• Display PostScript and a windowing engine
• the Objective-C language and runtime
• an object-oriented (OO) application layer, including several "kits"
• development tools for the OO layers

The key to NEXTSTEP's fame were the last three items. The toolkits offered incredible power, and were used to build all of the software on the machine. Distinctive features of the Objective-C language made the writing of applications with NEXTSTEP far easier than on many competing systems, and the system was often pointed to as a paragon of computer development, even a decade later. A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... Mach is an operating system kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... NeXT Computer Inc. ... Objective-C, often referred to as ObjC or more seldomly as Objective C or Obj-C, is an object oriented programming language implemented as an extension to C. It is used primarily on Mac OS X and GNUstep, two environments based on the OpenStep standard, and is the primary language... This article is becoming very long. ...

NEXTSTEP's user interface was refined and consistent, and introduced the idea of the Dock, carried through OPENSTEP and into Mac OS X, and the Shelf. NEXTSTEP also created or was among the very first to sport a large number of other GUI concepts now common in other operating systems: 3D "chiseled" widgets, system-wide drag and drop of a wide range of objects beyond file icons, system-wide piped services, real-time scrolling and window dragging, properties dialog boxes ("inspectors"), window modification notices (such as the saved status of a file), etc. The system was among the first general-purpose user interfaces to handle publishing color standards, transparency, sophisticated sound and music processing (through a Motorola 56000 DSP), advanced graphics primitives, internationalization, and modern typography in a consistent manner across all applications. Mac OS X Dock Window Maker dock, similar to the NeXTSTEP dock The Dock is a graphical user interface feature first introduced in the NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP operating systems, and radically changed and refined in Mac OS X, where it has gained the behaviour of Newtons Newton OS Dock. ... Mac OS X (IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ... The Shelf is an interface feature in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, and is used as a repository to store links to commonly used files, directories and programs, and as a temporary holding place to move/copy files and directories around in the filesystem hierarchy. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... Services menu (or simply Services) is a user interface element in a computer operating system. ... The Motorola 56000 (56k) is a family of DSP chips produced by Motorola from the 1980s on, still continuing to be produced in more advanced models in the 2000s. ... A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing, generally in real-time. ...

Additional kits were added to the product line to make the system more attractive. This included Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), which allowed easy remote invocation, and Enterprise Objects Framework, a powerful object-relational database system. These kits made the system particularly interesting to custom application programmers, and NEXTSTEP had a long history in the financial programming community. A remote procedure call (RPC) is a protocol that allows a computer program running on one host to cause code to be executed on another host without the programmer needing to explicitly code for this. ... The Enterprise Objects Framework (or more commonly, EOF) was introduced by NeXT in 1994 as a pioneering object-relational mapping product for its NeXTSTEP and OpenStep development platforms. ... An object-relational database (ORD) or object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) is a relational database management system that allows developers to integrate the database with their own custom data types and methods. ... The term database originated within the computer industry, though its meaning has been broadened by popular use,includes non-electronic databases within its definition. ...

Naming

The name was officially capitalized in many different ways, initially being NextStep, then NeXTstep, then NeXTSTEP, and became NEXTSTEP (all capitals) only at the end of its life. The capitalization most commonly used by "insiders" is NeXTstep. The confusion continued after the release of the OpenStep standard, when NeXT released what was effectively an OpenStep-compliant version of NEXTSTEP with the name OPENSTEP.

Influence

The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was developed on the NEXTSTEP platform. Some features and keyboard shortcuts now commonly found in web browsers can be traced to originally being native features of NEXTSTEP, which other web browsers for other operating systems later reimplemented as features of the browser itself. The basic layout options of HTML 1.0 and 2.0 are attributable to those features available in NeXT's Text class. The game Doom was also largely developed on NeXT machines, as was Macromedia FreeHand, the modern "Notebook" interface for Mathematica, and the advanced spreadsheet Lotus Improv. An example of a web browser (Mozilla Firefox running under Microsoft Windows). ... WorldWideWeb was the worlds first web browser and WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) HTML editor. ... Doom (or DOOM)[1] is a 1993 computer game by id Software that is among the landmark titles in the first-person shooter genre. ... Macromedia FreeHand is a computer application for creating two-dimensional vector graphics, oriented to the professional desktop publishing market. ... This article is about computer software. ... Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Development that attempted to re-define the way a spreadsheet should work. ...

Versions

The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. ... PA-RISC is a microprocessor architecture developed by Hewlett-Packards Systems & VLSI Technology Operation. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ... The OPENSTEP desktop. ...

Notes

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. ... GNU logo (similar in appearance to a gnu) The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free content, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU project. ...

See also

• Openstep
• GNUstep, a GPL version
• Window maker, a window manager designed to emulate the NeXT GUI for Linux and others

The OPENSTEP desktop. ... GNUstep is a free software implementation of NeXTs OpenStep Objective-C libraries (called frameworks), widget toolkit, and application development tools not only for Unix-like operating systems, but also for Microsoft Windows. ... The GNU logo For other uses of GPL, see GPL (disambiguation). ... Window Maker is a window manager for the X Window System, which allows graphical applications to be run on Unix-like operating-systems. ... On Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and ME you can enter the Windows device manager by clicking Start, Settings, Control Panel, System icon, and clicking on the Device Manager tab. ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...

External links

• A complete guide to the confusing series of names applied to the system
• http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microkernel/Mach/NeXT/
• Intro to NEXTSTEP
• Steve Jobs demonstrates NeXTSTEP