History of OS X - Development Outside of Apple

Development Outside of Apple

After Apple removed Steve Jobs from management in 1985, he left the company and attempted — with funding from Ross Perot and his own pockets — to create the "next big thing": the result was NeXT. NeXT hardware was advanced for its time, being the first workstation to include a DSP and a high-capacity optical disc drive, but it had several quirks and design problems and was expensive compared to the rapidly commoditizing workstation market. The hardware was phased out in 1993, however, the company's object-oriented operating system NeXTSTEP had a more lasting legacy.

NeXTSTEP was based on the Mach kernel and BSD, an implementation of Unix dating back to the 1970s. It featured an object-oriented programming framework based on the Objective-C language. This environment is known today in the Mac world as Cocoa. It also supported the innovative Enterprise Objects Framework database access layer and WebObjects application server development environment, among other notable features.

All but abandoning the idea of an operating system, NeXT managed to maintain a business selling WebObjects and consulting services, but was never a commercial success. NeXTSTEP underwent an evolution into OPENSTEP which separated the object layers from the operating system below, allowing it to run with less modification on other platforms. OPENSTEP was, for a short time, adopted by Sun Microsystems. However, by this point, a number of other companies — notably Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and even Sun itself — were claiming they would soon be releasing similar object-oriented operating systems and development tools of their own. (Some of these efforts, such as Taligent, did not fully come to fruition; others, like Java, gained widespread adoption.)

Following an announcement on December 20, 1996, on February 4, 1997, Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, and used OPENSTEP as the basis for OS X. Traces of the NeXT software heritage can still be seen in 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 OS X straightforwardly states that the command "First appeared in NeXTStep."