Re: Apple Events

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> In emacs-23.2, mac.c is gone that there is now nsterm.m and nsterm.h which
>> connects to ns-win.el.  (ns is for NextStep I presume -- what Apple came
>> from.
>
> Not Apple: NeXTstep is the OS that was developed by NeXT when Steve
> Jobs got kicked off Apple, and when he reintegrated Apple he brought it
> back with him.  Mac OS X can be seen as a merge of Mac OS and NeXTstep.


Not exactly.  Apple failed in it's development of Pink in collaboration
with IBM, and was in search of an alternative, desperately, since MacOS
had reached its limits since a few versions already.  At a time they
fancied buying BeOS, but Gassé (an ex-Apple guy) asked too much for his
company and OS.  Desperate, some Apple employees contacted some NeXT
employees to see if it would be envisageable that Apple buys NeXT and
progressively the idea bubbled up to the CEOs.  So finally, Apple
decided to buy NeXT Computer Inc, and along with the OS, replaced most
of its senior officers by NeXT's.  

In a way, it's NeXTSTEP, bought by Apple, that brought Steve Jobs (and
Tenavian and others) with it.


>> Curiously, there is a reference to "GNU Window system" somewhere in
>> one of the comments.  Is that going to be NextStep as well?)
>
> The API used for the NeXTstep port is also supported by GNUstep, so this
> port can also support GNUstep, tho sadly this doesn't work very well
> right now, mostly for lack of active users willing or able to help debug
> and maintain it.

Also, a problem is that Apple keeps Cocoa evolving fast, and that the
standardized OpenStep core is becoming smaller and smaller relatively.
Therefore it's more and more difficult to write an application that may
compile on both Cocoa and GNUstep.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.