6 ms·

> Apple basically took NeXTSTEP and slapped their own window manager and app framework on it only Yup, that’s precisely it, and Apple made no secret of this. A

> Apple basically took NeXTSTEP and slapped their own window manager and app framework on it only Yup, that’s precisely it, and Apple made no secret of this. As early as the mid 90s, Apple knew their OS was a dead end and they needed to start over with a new OS as the base. Their in-house effort (Copland) was becoming an obvious failure and it was apparent they needed outside help. At the time a lot of people thought BeOS was going to be it, but the deal fell through when it became apparent that having Steve come back was a priority, and buying NeXT came with him. But it was always gonna be the case that the OS was going to be totally replaced and only surface level UI conventions would be maintained from classic macOS.

mepian 2y ago
I wonder why exactly Copland went off the rails, do we have anyone from the Copland team here on HN who can share their view?
- johnflan 2y ago
  I’d love to know more about its design too
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Apple published a book about it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/524838 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/524838
  - mrpippy 2y ago
    A bunch of documentation was posted here, although I’m not sure the links still work (might need to go through archive.org) https://www.pagetable.com/?p=211 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=211
- zitterbewegung 2y ago
  From the wikipedia page it was that they were just adding feature after feature. As an aside it is very interesting that Classic Mac OS was attempted to be replaced by a microkernel twice but was successful because they figured out how to ship NeXT with fresh paint and an slightly improved window manager that really was just NeXT if you compare the two. (A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX, Copland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    I think “slightly improved” and “fresh paint” undersells the work Apple did. Replacing the NeXTstep Display PostScript server wasn’t a small thing!
    - lallysingh 2y ago
      With PDF? Afaik it's a subset of PS so their main work would be in reducing the amount of PS features.
      - WillAdams 2y ago
        Mike Paquette wrote extensively about the effort involved to replace Display PostScript (which NeXT mostly wrote) with "Display PDF" as Quartz is often referred to as. See postings to usenet on comp.sys.next.*
        xorcist 2y ago
        I'd love a link or two if you can dig them up.
        WillAdams 2y ago
        It would have been in a thread like to: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/OLc8T6KOrM4/m/Vec3gLCPgnwJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/OLc8T6KO...
    - musicale 2y ago
      As I noted in another comment, it was a remarkable accomplishment that Mac OS X was reasonably recognizable to Mac users and ran the same apps (via Classic and Carbon), all while having a completely different core OS under the hood (though as another poster noted they had prior experience building Mac-on-Unix environments.) Apple has pulled off a number of surprisingly successful "brain transplant" transitions for the Mac platform, including moving from 68K to PowerPC to intel to ARM. In each case, the user experience remained largely the same and old apps continued to run via emulation.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Yes. Focus is about saying “no.” None of the Copland management or marketing people ever said “no”. So instead of just porting the Mac toolbox to C and a microkernel and shipping that as a first step, it had to have a new filesystem API (so abstract that it will support non-hierarchical filesystems!), and a new OO system for handling text strings, and a new UI toolkit, a new help system, oh, and an OpenDoc-based Finder… A lot of potentially good ideas, but you simply cannot do that all at once. It wasn’t actually a completely lost cause. They could have shipped it in six months if they’d just simplified the damn thing to a native UI toolbox on top of a microkernel, API additions cut to the bone. (One of the problems with that plan, though, is that product marketing wants all the features you can cram in, so you have to be willing to tell them “no” too.) Anyway, Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock also didn’t know how to manage software projects, so instead of fixing what they had, they decided to buy outside tech. Which means we got the iPod, the iPhone, etc. But, in context, they were total dumbfucks; they could have gotten there with what they had.
  - ngcc_hk 2y ago
    That is a bold claim. If they do not know … how can they do that. And a technical solution to exist need management know-how, financial viability or at least the market allow you to play out. That is why even if you were right, within Steve Jobs there would not Apple. World need to have a mix or proper mix of important things. The reason why communism fall always not because it’s ideal but because it is wrong in human level. You need a mix. A proper mix.
  - wpm 2y ago
    Gil took over as CEO two years after the Copeland project began under Michael Spindler, and turned it around enough to ship Mac OS 8 a few weeks after he was ousted by the board (after Jobs broke a gentleman's agreement he had with Amelio and sold his 1.5M shares, tanking the share price). Gil Amelio was not a great CEO by any measure, but he deserves credit for helping save Apple. He uttered the first "no". "No", we are not going to ship this Copeland thing, it's hopeless, we either have to buy another OS and build from that, or sell the company because we're out of time.
- Someone 2y ago
  One reason was that they tried to have both a preemptive OS with memory protection and backwards compatibility with existing OS extensions, which frequently patched OS calls left and right, read and wrote memory across process boundaries, etc. For example, there was no support for screensavers in MacOS classic; screen savers such as After Dark hacked that in by patching various OS calls. There was no support for Adobe type 3 fonts; Adobe Type Manger hacked that in. There was no support for showing a row of extension icons on-screen as they loaded; an informal protocol was created by various extension-writers to support that.
  - indolering 2y ago
    It's incredible that it only crashed once a day!
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      Even Mac OS X early on had problems. I actually maintained a "Crash Log" at the entrance to my cubicle, recording how many times a given application had crashed that day/week/month/year and ultimately extended it to record even the preceding years. Quark XPress 6 required a colour-coding which reached into the hundreds for a given year (my recovery folder got cleared out once a week and had hundreds of GBs of files in it most Fridays), and Adobe Acrobat wasn't far behind (but no recover folder), while the OS itself was quite reliable --- work done using TeXshop and other Cocoa apps rarely crashed or had problems. It was a big change from NeXTstep, where I can only recall one software crash, and two hardware faults (SCSI) during college, which was the high-water mark of my GUI experience, w/ a NeXT Cube (w/ Wacom ArtZ and a scanner) and NCR-3125 (running Go Corp.'s PenPoint) and Apple Newton MessagePad all connected together using a serial interface to write papers and take notes and do graphic design work on.
  - SllX 2y ago
    I know there was more to it than that, but it seems to me that a better managed Apple in some alternate history might have just thrown all the extensions "support" out, shipped, and said there would a better documented API for that kind of crap in the future. Probably also not waste time on OpenDoc because there was no shot that was ever going anywhere if you considered it from Microsoft's, QuarkXpress's and Adobe's perspectives. Which is basically one of the reasons Mac OS X actually ended up shipping. You got a Classic VM in an OS that otherwise didn't care about making breaking changes, but you had a sliding scale from Classic to Carbon to Cocoa to fix your software eventually. Also OpenDoc got thrown out of consideration very early in the house cleaning process at Apple.
Projectiboga 2y ago
The BeOS guy asked too much from what I recall. I think the BeOS thing fell through before Mr Jobs quietly returned in 1997.
- bluejekyll 2y ago
  As I recall, BeOS was asking on the order of $80 million, NeXT was acquired for $400 million. I found this reference, so 80 valuation, Be wanted upwards of 200, “In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system. BeOS had many of the features Apple sought, and around Christmas time they offered to buy Be for $120 million, later raising their bid to $200 million. However, despite estimates of Be's total worth at approximately $80 million,[citation needed] Gassée held out for $275 million, and Apple balked. In a surprise move, Apple went on to purchase NeXT, the company their former co-founder Steve Jobs had earlier left Apple to found, for $429 million, with the high price justified by Apple getting Jobs and his NeXT engineers in tow. NeXTSTEP was used as the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e
  - stergios 2y ago
    “BeOS did not have printing” was the insult thrown around at the time.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    I don’t remember the exact number, but BeOS was too incomplete at the time to spend what they were asking, and maybe to purchase at all. There was no way to print documents, which still mattered a lot for a desktop OS in 1996. It needed a lot of work. Now, in retrospect, Apple had time; Mac OS X wasn’t ready for the mainstream until 2003-2004.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      To be fair, printing in 1995-6 was a huge can of worms and hell on earth.
sircastor 2y ago
I think Steve ended up being a better salesperson than Jean-Louis Gassé. And to be fair, for all its incredible effort I don't think that BeOS was as mature as NextStep. As I recall, there were some early UI efforts that essentially copied the Classic MacOS feel (the MacOS 8/Copland look) onto NextStep, but they were dropped in favor of OS X's Aqua design (which took inspiration from the iMac design)
- paride5745 2y ago
  Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was using the classic Mac OS look over a NextStep base. You can find x86 versions online which work in VM, for nostalgia and research.
  - jasomill 2y ago
    To be a bit more specific, Mac OS X Rhapsody DR2 (1998) was the last x86 Mac OS build to ship until the x86 Developer Transition Kit shipped with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.1 in 2005, and Rhapsody DR1 was the first, and only other, pre-Tiger x86 Mac OS release, though unreleased x86 ports of earlier, pre-NEXTSTEP Mac OS releases were demonstrated internally[1]. Additionally, NeXT shipped several x86 releases of NEXTSTEP and its successor OpenStep (NEXTSTEP 3.1–3.3, 1993–1995; OpenStep 4.0–4.2, 1996–1997) prior to the acquisition, all of which also run under virtualization with some effort — though I'd personally recommend the Previous emulator[2] for running older NEXTSTEP builds, as it runs reasonably fast on modern hardware and quite a bit of historically interesting NEXTSTEP software exists that was never released for versions of NEXTSTEP running on non-NeXT hardware (Mathematica 1.0, Lotus Improv, WordPerfect, and the original CERN WorldWideWeb browser come to mind, though source ports of the latter exist). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project [2] https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.1740 https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.17...
    - basementcat 2y ago
      Do command line programs built on Rhapsody DR2 (x86) run on Tiger (x86) or vice versa?
frizlab 2y ago
They even “buried” MacOS 9 in a WWDC keynote.
philwelch 2y ago
Steve Jobs coming back was not really a deciding factor. In retrospect Steve Jobs was essential to Apple’s success after taking over, but when the acquisition happened, there was little reason to expect that. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Steve Jobs did a good job founding Apple and running the Macintosh project, but he wasn’t fit to run a company the size as Apple. NeXT, if anything, vindicated that impression with a string of high profile product flops. At the time of the acquisition, Apple was dying, and NeXT had spent over a decade and billions of dollars growing into a company that could, at best, hope to be acquired by a dying Apple. The choice of NeXT over Be mostly came down to NeXTStep being a genuinely better operating system than BeOS in many ways as well as Gassee overestimating his own negotiating position. Steve Jobs managed to take over the company, but this was clearly not the intended outcome because almost all of the executives who were involved in the decision to acquire NeXT were fired in the process, and after Jobs took over he also forced almost the entire board to resign as well.
- lapcat 2y ago
  Jobs also (in)famously sold all of the APPL stock that he received in the NeXT acquisition, saying that he had no faith in Apple leadership at the time. In retrospect, this sale cost Jobs a ton of money. Of course he ended up doing fine, mostly because of the Pixar acquisition by Disney.
  - philwelch 2y ago
    Yes, this was one of the moves in his coup against Amelio, and part of what led to Amelio being fired by the board, at which point Steve Jobs took over on an "interim" basis and promised to search for a new permanent CEO.
    - SllX 2y ago
      Not quite. He sold his shares in 1985. I think technically it was all except one so he could still get investor reports, but that last part might be apocryphal. https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-jobs-prepares-to-take-on-apple https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-...
musicale 2y ago
> their own window manager and app framework on it only Window manager in this case including Quartz/Core Graphics (replacing Display Postscript) as well as complete UI facelift/transplant that turned the NeXTSTEP file browser into the Mac OS X Finder (even if it imperfectly copied the spatial orientation of the classic Finder.) App framework being not only a Mac flavor of AppKit/Foundation/NS* (Cocoa) but also a virtual legacy Mac OS layer (Classic) as well as a hybrid API (Carbon) that worked on Mac OS 9 and OS X, providing a fairly complete Mac app transition strategy (classic -> carbon -> cocoa). Cocoa also worked with the (later abandoned) Java bridge as well as Objective-C++ and OSA/AppleScript/etc.

mepian 2y ago

I wonder why exactly Copland went off the rails, do we have anyone from the Copland team here on HN who can share their view?

johnflan 2y ago
I’d love to know more about its design too
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Apple published a book about it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/524838 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/524838
- mrpippy 2y ago
  A bunch of documentation was posted here, although I’m not sure the links still work (might need to go through archive.org) https://www.pagetable.com/?p=211 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=211
zitterbewegung 2y ago
From the wikipedia page it was that they were just adding feature after feature. As an aside it is very interesting that Classic Mac OS was attempted to be replaced by a microkernel twice but was successful because they figured out how to ship NeXT with fresh paint and an slightly improved window manager that really was just NeXT if you compare the two. (A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX, Copland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  I think “slightly improved” and “fresh paint” undersells the work Apple did. Replacing the NeXTstep Display PostScript server wasn’t a small thing!
  - lallysingh 2y ago
    With PDF? Afaik it's a subset of PS so their main work would be in reducing the amount of PS features.
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      Mike Paquette wrote extensively about the effort involved to replace Display PostScript (which NeXT mostly wrote) with "Display PDF" as Quartz is often referred to as. See postings to usenet on comp.sys.next.*
      - xorcist 2y ago
        I'd love a link or two if you can dig them up.
        WillAdams 2y ago
        It would have been in a thread like to: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/OLc8T6KOrM4/m/Vec3gLCPgnwJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/OLc8T6KO...
  - musicale 2y ago
    As I noted in another comment, it was a remarkable accomplishment that Mac OS X was reasonably recognizable to Mac users and ran the same apps (via Classic and Carbon), all while having a completely different core OS under the hood (though as another poster noted they had prior experience building Mac-on-Unix environments.) Apple has pulled off a number of surprisingly successful "brain transplant" transitions for the Mac platform, including moving from 68K to PowerPC to intel to ARM. In each case, the user experience remained largely the same and old apps continued to run via emulation.
KerrAvon 2y ago
Yes. Focus is about saying “no.” None of the Copland management or marketing people ever said “no”. So instead of just porting the Mac toolbox to C and a microkernel and shipping that as a first step, it had to have a new filesystem API (so abstract that it will support non-hierarchical filesystems!), and a new OO system for handling text strings, and a new UI toolkit, a new help system, oh, and an OpenDoc-based Finder… A lot of potentially good ideas, but you simply cannot do that all at once. It wasn’t actually a completely lost cause. They could have shipped it in six months if they’d just simplified the damn thing to a native UI toolbox on top of a microkernel, API additions cut to the bone. (One of the problems with that plan, though, is that product marketing wants all the features you can cram in, so you have to be willing to tell them “no” too.) Anyway, Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock also didn’t know how to manage software projects, so instead of fixing what they had, they decided to buy outside tech. Which means we got the iPod, the iPhone, etc. But, in context, they were total dumbfucks; they could have gotten there with what they had.
- ngcc_hk 2y ago
  That is a bold claim. If they do not know … how can they do that. And a technical solution to exist need management know-how, financial viability or at least the market allow you to play out. That is why even if you were right, within Steve Jobs there would not Apple. World need to have a mix or proper mix of important things. The reason why communism fall always not because it’s ideal but because it is wrong in human level. You need a mix. A proper mix.
- wpm 2y ago
  Gil took over as CEO two years after the Copeland project began under Michael Spindler, and turned it around enough to ship Mac OS 8 a few weeks after he was ousted by the board (after Jobs broke a gentleman's agreement he had with Amelio and sold his 1.5M shares, tanking the share price). Gil Amelio was not a great CEO by any measure, but he deserves credit for helping save Apple. He uttered the first "no". "No", we are not going to ship this Copeland thing, it's hopeless, we either have to buy another OS and build from that, or sell the company because we're out of time.
Someone 2y ago
One reason was that they tried to have both a preemptive OS with memory protection and backwards compatibility with existing OS extensions, which frequently patched OS calls left and right, read and wrote memory across process boundaries, etc. For example, there was no support for screensavers in MacOS classic; screen savers such as After Dark hacked that in by patching various OS calls. There was no support for Adobe type 3 fonts; Adobe Type Manger hacked that in. There was no support for showing a row of extension icons on-screen as they loaded; an informal protocol was created by various extension-writers to support that.
- indolering 2y ago
  It's incredible that it only crashed once a day!
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Even Mac OS X early on had problems. I actually maintained a "Crash Log" at the entrance to my cubicle, recording how many times a given application had crashed that day/week/month/year and ultimately extended it to record even the preceding years. Quark XPress 6 required a colour-coding which reached into the hundreds for a given year (my recovery folder got cleared out once a week and had hundreds of GBs of files in it most Fridays), and Adobe Acrobat wasn't far behind (but no recover folder), while the OS itself was quite reliable --- work done using TeXshop and other Cocoa apps rarely crashed or had problems. It was a big change from NeXTstep, where I can only recall one software crash, and two hardware faults (SCSI) during college, which was the high-water mark of my GUI experience, w/ a NeXT Cube (w/ Wacom ArtZ and a scanner) and NCR-3125 (running Go Corp.'s PenPoint) and Apple Newton MessagePad all connected together using a serial interface to write papers and take notes and do graphic design work on.
- SllX 2y ago
  I know there was more to it than that, but it seems to me that a better managed Apple in some alternate history might have just thrown all the extensions "support" out, shipped, and said there would a better documented API for that kind of crap in the future. Probably also not waste time on OpenDoc because there was no shot that was ever going anywhere if you considered it from Microsoft's, QuarkXpress's and Adobe's perspectives. Which is basically one of the reasons Mac OS X actually ended up shipping. You got a Classic VM in an OS that otherwise didn't care about making breaking changes, but you had a sliding scale from Classic to Carbon to Cocoa to fix your software eventually. Also OpenDoc got thrown out of consideration very early in the house cleaning process at Apple.

Projectiboga 2y ago

The BeOS guy asked too much from what I recall. I think the BeOS thing fell through before Mr Jobs quietly returned in 1997.

bluejekyll 2y ago
As I recall, BeOS was asking on the order of $80 million, NeXT was acquired for $400 million. I found this reference, so 80 valuation, Be wanted upwards of 200, “In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system. BeOS had many of the features Apple sought, and around Christmas time they offered to buy Be for $120 million, later raising their bid to $200 million. However, despite estimates of Be's total worth at approximately $80 million,[citation needed] Gassée held out for $275 million, and Apple balked. In a surprise move, Apple went on to purchase NeXT, the company their former co-founder Steve Jobs had earlier left Apple to found, for $429 million, with the high price justified by Apple getting Jobs and his NeXT engineers in tow. NeXTSTEP was used as the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e
- stergios 2y ago
  “BeOS did not have printing” was the insult thrown around at the time.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  I don’t remember the exact number, but BeOS was too incomplete at the time to spend what they were asking, and maybe to purchase at all. There was no way to print documents, which still mattered a lot for a desktop OS in 1996. It needed a lot of work. Now, in retrospect, Apple had time; Mac OS X wasn’t ready for the mainstream until 2003-2004.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    To be fair, printing in 1995-6 was a huge can of worms and hell on earth.

sircastor 2y ago

I think Steve ended up being a better salesperson than Jean-Louis Gassé. And to be fair, for all its incredible effort I don't think that BeOS was as mature as NextStep. As I recall, there were some early UI efforts that essentially copied the Classic MacOS feel (the MacOS 8/Copland look) onto NextStep, but they were dropped in favor of OS X's Aqua design (which took inspiration from the iMac design)

paride5745 2y ago
Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was using the classic Mac OS look over a NextStep base. You can find x86 versions online which work in VM, for nostalgia and research.
- jasomill 2y ago
  To be a bit more specific, Mac OS X Rhapsody DR2 (1998) was the last x86 Mac OS build to ship until the x86 Developer Transition Kit shipped with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.1 in 2005, and Rhapsody DR1 was the first, and only other, pre-Tiger x86 Mac OS release, though unreleased x86 ports of earlier, pre-NEXTSTEP Mac OS releases were demonstrated internally[1]. Additionally, NeXT shipped several x86 releases of NEXTSTEP and its successor OpenStep (NEXTSTEP 3.1–3.3, 1993–1995; OpenStep 4.0–4.2, 1996–1997) prior to the acquisition, all of which also run under virtualization with some effort — though I'd personally recommend the Previous emulator[2] for running older NEXTSTEP builds, as it runs reasonably fast on modern hardware and quite a bit of historically interesting NEXTSTEP software exists that was never released for versions of NEXTSTEP running on non-NeXT hardware (Mathematica 1.0, Lotus Improv, WordPerfect, and the original CERN WorldWideWeb browser come to mind, though source ports of the latter exist). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project [2] https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.1740 https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.17...
  - basementcat 2y ago
    Do command line programs built on Rhapsody DR2 (x86) run on Tiger (x86) or vice versa?

frizlab 2y ago

They even “buried” MacOS 9 in a WWDC keynote.

philwelch 2y ago

Steve Jobs coming back was not really a deciding factor. In retrospect Steve Jobs was essential to Apple’s success after taking over, but when the acquisition happened, there was little reason to expect that. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Steve Jobs did a good job founding Apple and running the Macintosh project, but he wasn’t fit to run a company the size as Apple. NeXT, if anything, vindicated that impression with a string of high profile product flops. At the time of the acquisition, Apple was dying, and NeXT had spent over a decade and billions of dollars growing into a company that could, at best, hope to be acquired by a dying Apple. The choice of NeXT over Be mostly came down to NeXTStep being a genuinely better operating system than BeOS in many ways as well as Gassee overestimating his own negotiating position. Steve Jobs managed to take over the company, but this was clearly not the intended outcome because almost all of the executives who were involved in the decision to acquire NeXT were fired in the process, and after Jobs took over he also forced almost the entire board to resign as well.

lapcat 2y ago
Jobs also (in)famously sold all of the APPL stock that he received in the NeXT acquisition, saying that he had no faith in Apple leadership at the time. In retrospect, this sale cost Jobs a ton of money. Of course he ended up doing fine, mostly because of the Pixar acquisition by Disney.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Yes, this was one of the moves in his coup against Amelio, and part of what led to Amelio being fired by the board, at which point Steve Jobs took over on an "interim" basis and promised to search for a new permanent CEO.
  - SllX 2y ago
    Not quite. He sold his shares in 1985. I think technically it was all except one so he could still get investor reports, but that last part might be apocryphal. https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-jobs-prepares-to-take-on-apple https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-...

musicale 2y ago

> their own window manager and app framework on it only Window manager in this case including Quartz/Core Graphics (replacing Display Postscript) as well as complete UI facelift/transplant that turned the NeXTSTEP file browser into the Mac OS X Finder (even if it imperfectly copied the spatial orientation of the classic Finder.) App framework being not only a Mac flavor of AppKit/Foundation/NS* (Cocoa) but also a virtual legacy Mac OS layer (Classic) as well as a hybrid API (Carbon) that worked on Mac OS 9 and OS X, providing a fairly complete Mac app transition strategy (classic -> carbon -> cocoa). Cocoa also worked with the (later abandoned) Java bridge as well as Objective-C++ and OSA/AppleScript/etc.