When Apple’s board kicked Steve Jobs out of the company he himself had confused, Jobs founded another company: NeXT. “Next” in English clearly shows that Steve Jobs was ready to move on and, although the company under him was no longer called Apple, it could be considered the other “Apple”, more because of the development of subsequent events.
It was 1985 and after informing the board that he would be starting his own company and taking employees with him, Steve Jobs invested no less than $12 million of his own money to found NeXT. Together with his employees, considered directly as “members” of the team, he began to develop the first ideas.
An operating system that will be very familiar to us
In addition to releasing a few computers, such as the NeXT Computer, which was replaced in 1990 by the NeXT Cube and the NeXT Station, the company focused on the operating system. An operating system called NeXTSTEP—literally NEXTSTEP—which was based on core of Mach and that of BSD derived from UNIX. An operating system that had the ability to multitask, something to keep in mind back when we were.
NeXTSTEP 0.8
Shorten the story of what happened to NeXT, which they tell us at Xataka, when Apple realized it urgently needed an operating system with memory protection, network communications and an object-oriented application layer purchased NeXT. The figure paid by the company in 1997 was $429 million and $1.5 million in stock.
NeXTSTEP 2.0
The purpose of the purchase? Convert the NeXT operating system to a new version of MacOS which would be called MacOS X. With an X marking 10, that numbering was with us until just a few years ago, when macOS Big Sur upgraded to version 11 in late 2020. That’s how much weight NeXTSTEP had in Apple operating systems. .
NEXT STEP 3.3
And that’s why we all use it, even if it’s without knowing it. More if we take this into account iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS have been supported by macOS since its inception, and that in turn still retains the icons and concepts of NeXTSTEP. Several elements of the GUI, the same and ubiquitous Dock, the services menu and the Finder column view are all inherited from Steve Jobs’ other “Apple”, which at the time was still rolling around with plates of registration.
In the screenshots that accompany this article we review, in order, NeXTSTEP version 1.8, 2.0 and 3.3. And we clearly see elements that are familiar to us. Just above these lines we find the Mail application, for example. With a prominent Dock on the right side of the screen that already showed the trash can on one end.
in other captures we find the classic window menus, all of which are grouped together at the top of the screen, without being tied to a specific application or window. We also see the buttons for managing, but not closing, windows, which appear in the upper left corner. And also the Finder interface (calling it that to understand each other) with the famous column view that we use today.
Special mention to the solitaire game and the black and white flight simulator from NeXTSTEP 0.8 screenshot. Something really advanced for the time, although now it may seem archaic. In any case, an operating system that laid the foundation for all the Apple products we use today. An operating system that Steve Jobs took to the next step.
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