Re: [OT] History: GNUStep vs. Gnome
At 02:02 PM 9/26/2000, Daniel Reuter wrote:
NeXTStep was the operating system on the NeXTstation, one of the most
beautiful and technically well-designed computers that was ever built!
(IMHO). Unfortunately, NeXT has been swallowed by Apple, and they ceased
development of their OS. Instead, their work was incorporated into the
OpenStep project.
Actually, things are much better than this. NeXTStep is the basis of the
Next Mac OS, aka OS X. Apple acquired NeXT to get the OS, and they seem to
be set to use it. Since their OS is based on NeXT, and their CEO was the
CEO of NeXT (Steve Jobs), perhaps one should say NeXT swallowed Apple.
Also, OpenStep predates Apple's acquisition of NeXT by many years. The
idea was to have a NeXTStep like environment on a variety of platforms (HP,
Sun, etc.). Like NeXT itself, I hadn't noticed a lot of signs of life from
it, but I wasn't looking too hard.
I liked the NeXT too. I've even been considering getting a Mac when they
release the new system. I'm just so aggravated by the PC
architecture. It's very frustrating to find you just can't add hardware
because you're out of interrupts. I'm not sure the Mac is better on that
score, though. And I know both platforms have various newer (and
older--SCSI) solutions to the problem.
But of course, now I have Debian!
This is not just a desktop environment, but also incorporates the
OpenStep specifications for a whole object oriented programming
environment, and GNUstep tries to clone the features and even enhance it.
I think GNUstep has very interesting basic concepts (quite different from
the other two desktop environments).
Regards,
Daniel
Reply to: