OpenSTEP for VMS

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Tue Mar 5 20:14:45 2002

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Doc wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
>
> > What? No. Enlightenment is _not_ OPENSTEP. At best you can think of it
> > like this:
> >
> > OPENSTEP == Bentley
> > Enlightenment == Volkswagen Beetle with a Bentley hood kit
>
> ACK! No. We don't do Enlightenment here. I have somewhere the
> source to the "OpenSTEP" window manager for FreeBSD. It predates
> Enlightenment by a few years. I have no idea where I got it, and as I
> still can't get NeXTSTEP 3.1 to install, I don't know how authentic it
> is.

Are you sure you're not confusing OpenSTEP with GNUSTEP? The GNUSTEP
stuff was an X11 window manager which captured the look and feel of the
NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP desktop. OpenSTEP proper was just the last generation
of NeXTSTEP. The latest release I saw being OpenSTEP 4.2. It ran on
Intel/PC, Sun Sparc, and I think PA-RISC. I believe NeXTSTEP 3.3 was
the last version to support NeXT black hardware. The OpenSTEP name
started with the 4.0 release... by which time NeXT was long dead as a
hardware company. And as someone else pointed out, both of those
products were far more than mere desktops or window managers. They
referred to the entire OS and an amazing Objective-C development
framework.

Today, of course, this is all known as "Mac OS X". Right down to them
using the same goddamned "Bonk" and "Frog" alert sounds from NeXTSTEP.
Booting OS X for the first time is the most pleasant memory I've had in
maybe my past 5 years of computing.

-brian.
Received on Tue Mar 05 2002 - 20:14:45 GMT