was the original
Object-oriented ,
Multitasking Operating System that
NeXT Computer developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers ("black boxes"). Nextstep 1.0 was released on
September 18 ,
1989 after several previews starting in
1986 . The last version, 3.3, was released in early
1995 , by which time it ran not only on
Motorola 68000 Family processors, but also
IBM PC Compatible X86 , Sun
SPARC , and HP
PA-RISC .
Nextstep was a combination of several parts:
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.
Nextstep's user interface was refined and consistent, and introduced the idea of the , 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.
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.
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.
The first , the modern "Notebook" interface for
Mathematica , and the advanced spreadsheet
Lotus Improv .
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. Following an announcement on
December 20 ,
1996 ,
1 on
February 4 ,
1997 ,
Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, and used the OpenStep operating system as the basis for
Mac OS X .
2
A
Free Software implementation of the OpenStep standard,
GNUstep , also exists.
Versions up to 4.2 were published, the last version 4.2 after purchase of NeXT by Apple
