 openstep was an object-oriented application programming interface (api) specification for an 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),toastytech.com 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. ==history== 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 solari 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. the first draft of the api was published by next in summer 1994. later that year they released an openstep compliant version of nextstep as openstep, supported on several of their platforms as well as sun sparc systems. the official openstep api, published in september 1994, was the first to split the api between foundation and application kit and the first to use the "ns" prefix.cocoa fundamentals guide: a bit of history early versions of nextstep used an "nx" prefix and contained only the application kit, relying on stand
Application_programming_interfaces Berkeley_Software_Distribution OS_X_APIs