35 years ago, an unknown operating system changed everything

Today marks the 35th anniversary of NeXTSTEP, the computer operating system that Steve Jobs pioneered during his years away from Apple. Now obscure and long since retired, it nonetheless had a monumental impact on the history and development of computing—and led to many things we take for granted every day.

The World Wide Web? It was invented in NeXTSTEP. It paved the way for macOS and all the other modern Apple operating systems. And as we mentioned earlier, it was created in a company run by a certain Steve Jobs. You may have heard of him.

Collectively, it’s hard to overstate the legacy of NeXTSTEP and its innovations, both large and small. It may be the most influential operating system you’ve never heard of.

Full of great ideas

The first release of NeXTSTEP was on September 18, 1989. NeXT Computer, the company that developed NeXTSTEP, was founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he was forced to leave Apple. When Jobs could no longer work on Apple computers, he created his own, including the operating system they ran.

NeXT produced high-end desktop computers, a far cry from the consumer-oriented Macs that are Apple’s modern bread and butter. To run its devices, NeXT needed an efficient operating system, and NeXTSTEP filled that gap.

It featured a wide range of tools and concepts that are still used today by both demanding professionals and consumer users. A quick look at NeXTSTEP’s features will show you how many of its innovations have stood the test of time. Here are a few of the things it was responsible for:

• macOS Dock
• Large, full-color icons
• Drag and drop functionality throughout the operating system
• Scrolling and dragging the window
• Properties Dialog Boxes
• Keyboard shortcuts that are still used today (e.g. Command-B and Command-I for bold and italic respectively, or Command-W to close a window)

NeXTSTEP did not invent graphical user interfaces, but their implementation made them much more popular in the entire computing sphere. Without them, today’s world would be very different.

Innovation Highway

NeXTSTEP hosted the Electronic AppWrapper, a forerunner of the modern concept of an app store. It was a catalog of applications, music, fonts, clip art, and more that handled the distribution, encryption, and licensing of the software it contained. It was a major step forward from traditional methods of distributing applications—usually using floppy disks or CD-ROMs—and although it was developed by an outside group rather than by NeXT, the Electronic AppWrapper found its home in NeXTSTEP. Like many aspects of NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time.

The app store was far from the only important tool created with NeXTSTEP. The operating system spawned a whole host of innovative apps, games, and utilities, many of which changed the world.

It was NeXTSTEP’s power that made it a great resource for programmers and application developers, so it was no surprise that it ended up at CERN, the nuclear research organization, and at Tim Berners-Lee, then a computer scientist at CERN.

You may recognize Berners-Lee’s name—he’s widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web, the URL system, the HTML markup language, and the HTTP protocol. And it was the first of these, the World Wide Web, that Berners-Lee created using NeXTSTEP.

After CERN management presented a proposal for a hypertext system, a NeXTcube computer was purchased for prototyping. As Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau said, “A prototype implementation of Tim in NeXTSTEP was completed in a few months, thanks to the features of the NeXTSTEP software development system.” It was the ideal partner for a project with the scope and scale of the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee also used NeXTSTEP to develop the world’s first web browser, which he called WorldWideWeb (not to be confused with the aforementioned World Wide Web, the information exchange system that interacts with the internet). The browser lasted only four years before being discontinued, but it introduced the world to WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) HTML editing, among other innovations.

And it wasn’t just Berners-Lee who was hard at work inventing things with NeXTSTEP. Popular games Doom and Quake were built on the system, as was its predecessor, the vector illustration application Macromedia FreeHand. NeXTSTEP was so powerful that it became a popular option for developers and coders in the emerging software world.

Epic Legacy

Yet for all its lasting effects, NeXTSTEP never became a huge commercial success. NeXT was never very profitable and sold only about 50,000 NeXT computers—a tiny drop in the ocean compared to its competitors.

But despite its small sales numbers, NeXTSTEP had a huge impact on computing. It was considered a trendsetter for its many innovations, and other companies quickly began to copy its ideas in their systems.

A struggling Apple—deep in crisis and nearly bankrupt—formally purchased NeXT in 1997 for $429 million, bringing Steve Jobs back on board in the process. It was a move that famously restored Apple’s fortunes and paved the way for its rise to global rock stardom, but this groundbreaking development was often overshadowed by the fact that Apple also acquired NeXTSTEP. The operating system was quickly merged with Apple’s existing software and eventually led to the first release of Mac OS X, ending active development of the NeXT operating system.

But its legacy lives on today, both in terms of the software features that are still in use and the things it was used to create. While it remains relatively unknown, there are few operating systems that have influenced the world of computing in quite the same way.