By InfoWorld Electric staff
Posted at 6:05 p.m., PT, Jan. 8 After 10 years, the end of the road for the
NextStep operating system is at hand. Next Computer Inc.'s CEO, Steve Jobs,
said last week that there would be no further upgrades of its
Mach-kernel-based OS. Instead, the company will concentrate on its profitable
business as a developer of object-oriented development tools that run on
multiple operating systems. "1996 is the year we move from NextStep to
OpenStep, on both our own Mach kernel and on Windows NT," Jobs said. "We will
continue to support the Mach OS as long as there is customer demand for it,
which seems like it will continue for quite a while." OpenStep is the
company's cross-platform object-oriented development environment and the heir
to NextStep Developer, the proprietary integrated development environment that
ran on the NextStep operating system. At Object World in San Francisco last
year, Next promised to ship a version of OpenStep for Windows 95 and Windows
NT, which it called OpenStep 4.0, in the first half of 1996. Last week Next
said it will also release a version of OpenStep 4.0 that runs on the Mach
kernel. Existing NextStep OS users should upgrade to this flavor of OpenStep,
said a NextStep representative. Abandoning a full-featured OS signals Next's
recognition that the company's market is with developers and not with ordinary
desktop users. "To the developer, it doesn't matter what's underneath, since
OpenStep hides the underlying OS," Jobs said.