OpenStep Solaris

[Alan Perry]

On 1/5/20 3:12 PM, Chris Hanson via cctalk wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2020, at 7:02 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> Sun *did* do a full port of OpenStep to Solaris, but while I know
>> people who saw it, I am not sure if it got a full commercial release.
> 
> Not quite! Sun was a participant in creating the OpenStep standard (the NS class prefix stands for “NeXT/Sun”) and *created their own implementation* of OpenStep for Solaris. (Just as GNUstep is an independent implementation of the OpenStep spec under the FSF umbrella, and OPENSTEP/Mach and OPENSTEP/Enterprise were NeXT’s implementations.)
> 
> OpenStep Solaris was released, both the user and developer environment, and you should be able to find them today and install them on Solaris 2.5 or later. I think OpenStep will run on everything through Solaris 7 or Solaris 8, but at some point it stopped working because it required Display PostScript in the window server.

I demoed OpenStep Solaris on top of CDE in my last exhibit at VCF PNW. 
It could be awkward trying to figure out where to look for application's 
menu. Just to make things extra ugly, I ran MAE (Macintosh Application 
Environment) at the same time.

I also have a SPARCstation 5 running OPENSTEP/Mach on SPARC.

> 
>> Sun also bought a number of NeXTstep software houses, including
>> Lighthouse, but didn't release the code.
> 
> Indeed, that was post-OpenStep; they weren’t buying companies like Lighthouse to get a suite of applications for OpenStep Solaris, they were buying them to port their stuff to Java (since Java was based rather heavily on Objective-C, and some aspects of the Java frameworks’ designs on OpenStep).
>

Lighthouse was also the source for the Sun CEO who gets a lot of blame 
for the fall of Sun.

alan