- published: 25 Feb 2010
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OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on a non-NeXTSTEP operating system. OpenStep was principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems, to allow NeXTSTEP (like) development on Sun's operating systems, specifically Solaris. NeXT produced a version of OpenStep for their own Mach-based Unix, known as OPENSTEP (all capitalized), as well as a version that ran on Windows NT. The software libraries that shipped with OPENSTEP are a superset of the original OpenStep specification, including many features from the original NeXTSTEP.
The OpenStep API was created as the result of a 1993 collaboration between NeXT and Sun Microsystems, allowing this cut-down version of the NeXTSTEP operating system object layers to be run on Sun's Solaris operating system (more specifically, Solaris on SPARC-based hardware). Most of the OpenStep effort was to strip away those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that consisted primarily of Display PostScript, the Objective-C runtime and compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not included was the basic operating system, or the lower-level display system.
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc.; CEO and largest shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Shortly after his death, Jobs's official biographer, Walter Isaacson, described him as the "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing."
Adopted at birth in San Francisco, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, Jobs's countercultural lifestyle was a product of his time. As a senior at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, his two closest friends were the older engineering student (and Homestead High alumnus) Wozniak and his countercultural girlfriend, the artistically inclined Homestead High junior Chrisann Brennan. Jobs briefly attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out, deciding to travel through India in 1974 and study Buddhism.