NeXTStep 0.x

NeXTSTEP, from NeXT Computers headed by Steve Jobs, is a Unix based operating system designed to run on m68K NeXT workstations. It later became the basis for OS X, with APIs and concepts preserved today.

This OS offered many unique things, in addition to the unique hardware it originally ran on. It had Interface Builder, a tool to create UIs with little to no code. To make building the UIs and code easier, it had robust database support to bind data with. Objective-C was the preferred programming language, a hybrid of C and Smalltalk. Underneath was a Mach microkernel and a 4.2BSD subsystem.

Screenshots

Release notes

NeXTSTEP 0.8 and 0.9 were pre-releases shipped with early NeXT hardware. These booted and ran entirely from proprietary NeXT/Cannon Optical Disk media. The archives here are in "dump" format, and must be restored to Optical Disk using the NeXTSTEP "restore" command.