Getting OpenStep 4.2 To Run In Colour – Trying Out Some Default Apps (PCEm v17)(PC)

#OpenStep #NeXTStep #PC

This is NOT running on real hardware, I am using the PCEm v17 emulator in combination with a 2Gb drive Image of OpenStep 4.x which has been setup to boot inside a virtual machine by Action Retro. This saved me a lot of time setting it up myself.

So NeXTStep from NeXT computers lead by Steve Jobs is a Unix operating system originally designed to run on Motorola 68K NeXT workstations. It later became the basis for OS X, with a lot of APIs & design concepts still recognizable today.

It was Object oriented, you could build GUIs for your applications without
needing to code. Database support was built into the OS. The programming
language used was Objective C – a hybrid of C and Smalltalk. All was running on top of a Mach micro- kernel and a 4.2 BSD Unix system.

NeXTStep 3.x was the first version to also run on PC hardware. It supported the Pentium 486 processor. Back in the day I actually tried it out on my 486DX-2 66 but only got it to work with B&W on my Trident 9400 graphics card. I found the whole thing quite fascinating as I had been using Macs next to PCs for quite some time and imagined PCs and Macs becoming
more unified. Perhaps to a point where it didn’t even matter which hardware
you had as the software would just work. (Perhaps my own little Pre-Java
dreams).

At University I was a student assistant teacher and actually was teaching
medical students all there was to know about databases (SQL) and Object
oriented data storage. We also used Smalltalk. NeXTStep and OpenStep
were quite fascinating to me.

With version 4.x the name was changed to OpenStep, which also was a shift from being just an OS to a portable API set intended to run on other
operating systems like Windows NT even!

Good times until it was all acquired by Apple. It sort of lives on in OS X.
Which has been renamed back to MacOS with the Big Sur release.

A nerd-video for sure. It interests me it might not interest you.

🙂 Cheers, Mark

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