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10 Years of OpenStep

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the back-in-the-day dept.

tarzeau writes "Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making 'write once, compile everywhere' a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers. The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely. Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works."

4 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Nexum · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about the first web browser for a start?

    The first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices?

    etc. Do some googling.

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  2. Re:Call me stupid, but.... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    The NeXTStep (a.k.a. OpenStep) API was developed as part of the NeXTOS that ran on NeXT workstations during the 90's. Several deals were made with other Unix vendors (including Sun) for them to support the "OpenStep" standard.

    NeXT was bought off by Apple, and was developed into Mac OS X. The OS X Cocoa API is really nothing more than the NeXTStep API set, and is almost 100% source compatible with programs from the old NeXT machines.

    More Information

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  3. Re:Call me stupid, but.... by mirko · · Score: 5, Informative

    The game Doom was also developed on NeXT.

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  4. Re:Call me stupid, but.... by WillAdams · · Score: 5, Informative

    WorldWideWeb.app and Doom have already been mentioned --- lengthy discussion of the former in the book _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, check the source for Doom.app and John Carmack's blog to learn how he feels about NeXTstep.

    Other things:

    - Altsys Virtuoso (this became Macromedia FreeHand)
    - Lotus Improv (which lives on as Quantrix or Flexisheet)
    - MusicKit
    - MiscKit
    - Pages by Pages
    - TouchType.app

    Other more recent developments:

    - Cenon - http://www.cenon.info
    - GNUmail
    - ProjectCenter
    - GORM

    William

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