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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

I just realized that more time has elapsed since the iPhone launched (about 14 years: 2007 - 2021) than had between when Jobs returned to Apple and the iPhone launched (about 11 years: 1996-2007). Yikes.

Also, the three month deadline helps explain why the iPhoneOS SDK was such a mess when it first launched.

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He was leading NextStep right before for ~12 years, iOS SDK is built on top of that effort (NSString - Nextstep string)

NeXT, and here's some more fun history on that: https://web.archive.org/web/20150824224400/http://www.cocoab...

Not just iOS. OS X merged in a ton of NextStep stuff to OS 9, and iOS happens to be based on that

Classic Mac OS and and Mac OS X were wholly separate operating systems.

Early versions of Mac OS X included the Classic environment, which was an OS X app that ran Mac OS 9 in a sandbox environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS#Classic)

Mac OS X/macOS also shipped for twenty'ish years with Carbon, which was a framework that offered a cleaned up subset of the old, classic Mac OS Toolbox. It was retired with 10.15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)#Deprecation_and_d...

Regarding iOS, though, yes you are correct. iOS was derived from Mac OS X, and Jobs spoke a number of times about how the iPhone was "real OS X". https://web.archive.org/web/20070822184142/http://macdailyne...

close but iirc, its more the opposite:

osx was nextstep with os9 stuff (toolbox etc) ported over as carbon (with a lot of other os9 stuff) to support porting older apps [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

but the kernel, gui, drivers everything was descended from nextstep

edit: (next/openstep)

Wrong on the drivers side.

The Objective-C drivers framework (DriverKit) was replaced by a C++ one based on a language subset (IO Kit).

It is no accident that IO Kit replacement is named Driver Kit as homage to the original NeXTSTEP driver framework.

right right, i guess i should have been more specific, but even though iokit was writtten in c++ it still followed much of the design patterns from the next/openstep one right?

In what concerns the architecture of a light OOP model for the drivers, I guess.

Tangent: you might enjoy r/BarbaraWalters4Scale for more of this kind of stuff

https://www.reddit.com/r/BarbaraWalters4Scale/

This is 110% the kind of content that I love to find on the Internet: https://www.reddit.com/r/BarbaraWalters4Scale/comments/nc00b...

Thanks for sharing that sub-reddit. Subscribed!

Also didn’t they debut it in the spring either way? I remember something like that. Or maybe it was 2.0

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