> NeXTSTEP itself, while revolutionary in aspects, did not have long commercial success. However some of its ideas and technologies live on in Mac OS, after corporate M&A and consolidation in the tech sector.
On the contrary, macOS is NeXTSTEP plus several years of development. It's what the NS means in NSLog.
It used to be, Tahoe is generations away from NeXTSTEP.
NeXTSTEP drivers were written in Objective-C, originally OS X used C++ subset based on COM (IO Kit), now moved into userspace and called Driver Kit, in homage to the NeXTSTEP DriverKit name.
NeXTSTEP was focused on OpenGL and Renderman, OS X used OpenGL, macOS is now using Metal.
NeXTSTEP drivers were on kernel space, now everything is moving into userspace.
NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript, OS X moved into PDF subset, nowadays that is only part of the rendering stack.
NeXTSTEP had a X Windows Server as well, on macOS that is now gone.
macOS Finder is nothing like the NeXTSTEP file application.
NeXTSTEP supported a concept similar to OLE, it is nowhere to be seen on macOS.
The point that the article makes is about opening up NeXT to other hardware platforms. So while from one perspective, you might argue it lives on inside Apple, you could also argue that's where nextstep died.
In the early 2000s I worked for a company that went all in on NeXTSTEP a decade earlier. The product was developed in a "4 GL" called 4D or 4th dimension.
We had to do a painful migration to windows nt/xp because NeXTSTEP was discontinued and apple actively fought to kill attempts to fork or open source the code base.
...I'm pretty sure the same would be true in any modern version of NeXTStep had it survived as its own 'brand' (apart from slightly different requirements caused by the hardware the OS needs to run on of course - e.g. running on a handful different Apple devices versus having to work on 'everything').
So is the jump between W9X and NT based OSes, both in the kernel, graphics modes (GDI, Direct Draw vs Direct3D to draw the desktop, compositing window managers...) and the like. Specially after Windows 8 where Direct Draw it's slow as hell and you need to use WineD3D which runs ddraw.dll on top of OpenGL. But you can use Win32 on both.
I would really like for it to be easier to run NeXT/OPENSTEP on modern hardware --- somehow, since Mac OS X 10.6.8, Mac OS has gotten ever less comfortable (and I really miss the "Unix Expert" checkbox, as well as the repositionable main menu, tear off menus, pop-up main menu, Display PostScript, nxhosting, &c.
An educational copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 was the last thing I purchased for myself from Apple since they discontinued the Newton MessagePad.... and I'm sad my Cube quit booting, and that I never got it running on my ThinkPad.
>NeXT tried to get its own NeXT RISC workstation to market (chased a chimera) and looked at Motorola 88000 and PowerPC
Jobs made a huge mistake by going with the 68K in the first place. DEC would prove just a few months after NeXT's October 1988 launch the viability of a MIPS-powered workstation.
Even better, in the long term, would have been to go with the 80386.
On the contrary, macOS is NeXTSTEP plus several years of development. It's what the NS means in NSLog.
NeXTSTEP drivers were written in Objective-C, originally OS X used C++ subset based on COM (IO Kit), now moved into userspace and called Driver Kit, in homage to the NeXTSTEP DriverKit name.
NeXTSTEP was focused on OpenGL and Renderman, OS X used OpenGL, macOS is now using Metal.
NeXTSTEP drivers were on kernel space, now everything is moving into userspace.
NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript, OS X moved into PDF subset, nowadays that is only part of the rendering stack.
NeXTSTEP had a X Windows Server as well, on macOS that is now gone.
macOS Finder is nothing like the NeXTSTEP file application.
NeXTSTEP supported a concept similar to OLE, it is nowhere to be seen on macOS.
The point that the article makes is about opening up NeXT to other hardware platforms. So while from one perspective, you might argue it lives on inside Apple, you could also argue that's where nextstep died.
In the early 2000s I worked for a company that went all in on NeXTSTEP a decade earlier. The product was developed in a "4 GL" called 4D or 4th dimension.
We had to do a painful migration to windows nt/xp because NeXTSTEP was discontinued and apple actively fought to kill attempts to fork or open source the code base.
An educational copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 was the last thing I purchased for myself from Apple since they discontinued the Newton MessagePad.... and I'm sad my Cube quit booting, and that I never got it running on my ThinkPad.
Let's hope projects like https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace succeed.
Jobs made a huge mistake by going with the 68K in the first place. DEC would prove just a few months after NeXT's October 1988 launch the viability of a MIPS-powered workstation.
Even better, in the long term, would have been to go with the 80386.