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This articles goes over the version history of the NeXTSTEP operating system, the operating system by NeXT that went on and became OPENSTEP and MacOS

Version Date Distribution medium Notes

0.8 October 12, 1988 MO disc NeXTStep Digital Webster, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, netboot, NFS

0.8a 1988 MO disc

0.9 1988 MO disc NeXT 0.9/1.0 Release Description

1.0 1989 MO disc

1.0a 1989 MO disc Photo of NeXTSTEP 1.0a MO disc

2.0 September 18, 1990 MO disc, CD-ROM Support for the NeXTstation, NeXTcube (aka m68040 cube). Support for floppy disk, CD-ROM, Fax modems, and color graphics. Workspace Manager now has the Shelf, copies performed in background, black hole is replaced by recycler icon. Terminal.app. Dynamic loading of drivers.

2.1 March 25, 1991 MO disc, CD-ROM Support for the NeXTdimension board. TeX, Internationalization improvements. New machines bought with 2.1 included Lotus Improv.

2.1a MO disc, CD-ROM

2.2 CD-ROM Support for the NeXTstation Turbo

3.0 September 8, 1992 CD-ROM Project Builder, 3D support with Interactive RenderMan, Pantone colors, PostScript Level 2, Object Linking and Embedding, Distributed Objects, Database Kit, Phone Kit, Indexing Kit, precompiled headers, HFS, AppleTalk, and Novell NetWare.

3.1 May 25, 1993 CD-ROM First release for the i386 architecture, introducing fat binaries.

3.2 October 1993 CD-ROM

3.3 February 1995 CD-ROM Support for the PA-RISC and SPARC architectures added, introducing Quad-fat Binaries. Last and most popular version released under the name NEXTSTEP. Referred to as NEXTSTEP/m68k, NEXTSTEP/Intel, NEXTSTEP/SPARC. NEXTSTEP/PA-RISC

Delivered on 2 CDs: NeXTSTEP CISC and NeXTSTEP RISC. The Developer CD includes libraries for all architectures, so that programs can be cross-compiled on any architecture for all architectures.

4.0 beta 1996 CD-ROM Very different user interface. Notable as being a precursor of many ideas later introduced in the macOS Dock.

Allegedly dropped due to complaints of having to re-teach users but not for technical reasons (the new UI worked well in the beta).

4.0 July 1996 CD-ROM Support for the PA-RISC architecture dropped. Support for m68k, i486, and SPARC architectures. Initial Release of OpenStep for Windows.

4.1 January 1997 CD-ROM Support for m68k, i486, and SPARC architectures, and OpenStep for Windows, under OPENSTEP Enterprise (NT only).

4.2 Pre-release 2 September 1997 CD-ROM Pre-release 2 circulated to limited number of developers before OpenStep and Apple acquisition.

Apple Rhapsody August 31, 1997 - October 27, 2000 CD-ROM While released after the Apple merger, these versions are still very close to NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. Arguably closer to NeXTSTEP than to Mac OS X. For example, they can still be used as remote display via NXHost.

Versions up to 4.1 are general releases. OPENSTEP 4.2 pre-release 2 is a bug-fix release published by Apple and supported for five years after its September 1997 release.

This article is a modified copy of its Wikipedia counterpart and needs to be rewritten for originality.

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NeXT - The main company hehind NeXTSTEP

NeXTSTEP - The main operating system from NeXT.

OPENSTEP - The successor to NeXTSTEP and the codebase for the majority of future Apple projects, including Mac OS X, OS X, Modern MacOS, iPhoneOS, iOS, iPadOS, and more.

Objective-C - The language used in NeXTSTEP

Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) - The successor to OPENSTEP

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Wikipedia - NeXTSTEP

Other sources are needed, and this article needs LOTS of improvement and original work to prevent it from being a copy and paste from Wikipedia.

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Written on: 2021 Saturday September 25th at 3:03 pm

Last revised on: 2021 Saturday September 25th at 3:03 pm

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Article version: 1 (2021 Saturday September 25th at 3:03 pm)

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