NeXT, OpenStep, and the Return of Steve Jobs to Apple
Reference: NeXT, OpenStep, and the Return of Steve Jobs to Apple
When I went to Xerox PARC in 1979 and saw the original genesis of the Graphical User Interface, they actually showed me three things. And I was so blinded by the first that I didn't hang around to find out about the other two. It took me years to rediscover them. The first was of course the Graphical User Interface which Xerox PARC had pioneered and they had a lot of it right and a lot of it was left to be completed. But the other two things --- the second was Object Oriented Programming. They had ita ll running back in 1979. And the third was networking. They had several hundred Altos hooked up with networked printing, network file servers, email, all in 1979. If I had just stayed for another twenty minutes . . .
Jobs also shows that until he left Apple, he was still commercializing his visits to Xerox PARC. With iCloud he completed the trifecta of GUI, OOP, and Networked Computing that was already available thirty years ago.
Steve Jobs, though he was not a programmer, also understood Object Oriented programming better than most programmers. Cue it up to 23:00 for his explanation and demonstration. He of course borrowed his understanding right from the source: Alan Kay and Xerox PARC.
