The History of iOS

When Objective-C 2.0 Essentials (a companion book to iPad Development Essentials) was published in 2010 one of the most popular chapters was, rather surprisingly, one entitled “The History of Objective-C”. Since much of the history of Objective-C also applies to iOS it seemed to make sense to adapt the original Objective-C chapter to also tell the history of iOS.

In the 1970s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer. After many years of success, Steve Jobs hired a marketing wizard from PepsiCo called John Sculley to help take Apple to the next level of business success. To cut a long story short, a boardroom battle ensued and Steve Jobs got pushed out of the company (for the long version of the story pick up a used copy of John Sculley's book Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple) leaving John Sculley in charge.

After leaving Apple, Jobs started a new company that he named NeXT to design an entirely new generation of computer systems. The operating system developed by NeXT to run on these computers was called NeXTstep and was based on the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University and the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) system developed at the University of California, Berkeley which, in turn, was based on the UNIX operating system. As it became clear that the NeXT hardware was a commercial failure, NeXT subsequently joined forces with Sun Microsystems to create a standardized version of NeXTstep named OPENstep which the Free Software Foundation then adopted as GNUstep.

During the 1990s, John Sculley left Apple and a procession of new CEOs came and went. During this time, Apple had been losing market share and struggling to come out with a new operating system to replace the aging Mac OS. After a number of failed attempts and partnerships, it was eventually decided that rather than try to write a new operating system, Apple should acquire a company that already had one. During Gil Amelio's brief reign as CEO, a shortlist of two companies was drawn up. One was a company called Be, Inc. founded by a former Apple employee named Jean-Louis Gassée, and the other was NeXT.

Ultimately, NeXT was selected and Steve Jobs once again joined Apple. In another boardroom struggle (another long story as outlined in Gil Amelio's book On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple) Steve Jobs pushed out Gil Amelio and once again became CEO of the company he had founded all those years ago.

The rest, as they say, is history. NeXTStep formed much of the foundation for the operating system that became Mac OS X. Mac OS X was subsequently modified to provide the operating system for the spectacularly successful iPhone. What was then called iPhone OS was later renamed iOS to coincide with the introduction of the iPad.

Although there is little obvious evidence of the history of iOS in the SDK there is one constant reminder for those aware of the operating system’s origins. Whilst working through this book you will encounter a number of Foundation Framework class names that begin the letters “NS” such as NSArray and NSString. The letters “NS” refer, of course, to the ‘N’ and ‘S’ in NextStep.