Re:Steve Jobs and the usable computer (2011)
by lioeters on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @06:36PM
(#24633871)
I wondered if Qemu can emulate NeXT, and the closest I found were:
https://github.com/blanham/qemu-NeXT
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_NeXTSTEP_on_Qemu
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2016/02/07/nextstep-in-yo...
Then I realized the "Previous" you mentioned is a full emulator for NeXTStep 0.x to 4.0 beta.
http://previous.alternative-system.com/
https://github.com/probonopd/previous - Mirrored from SourceForge
Fascinating..
As an ObjC programmer who started 15 years after it was written, it's interesting to see how different it is from even NeXTStep 4.2 (aka OpenStep) era code. Most methods don't have explicit return types (still valid, but ~never used), lots more C, no Foundation (didn't exist yet), AppKit was still using NX, etc.
That said, you can tell it's fundamentally the same toolset. There are still classes that more or less exist and work the same way today on modern Mac OS versions, it uses a NIB file, etc.