Today is April 1, 2016 —April Fools Day, and Apple is now 40 years old. It is no longer Apple Computer, but simply Apple. CEO Tim Cook says Apple is at “childhood’s end” but how did Apple really get here?
AppStorey brings you the true story of the web, the first App Store and how the tools and technologies created by one computer were responsible for the dot-com boom, and the mobile revolution we live in today.
In October of 1990, Eric Bergerson left the trading world of Wall St. to cofound Objective Technologies, Inc. a company dedicated to a new programming innovation called Object Oriented Programming. Specifically, Objective-C and Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer, the grandfather OS of Mac, iPhone and now Apple Watch and Apple TV.
So, it’s perfectly true for Eric to point out that he was getting a head-start on iOS development a generation before humanity was introduced to the mobile smartphone.
This was not innovation, this was revolution.
August 6, 1989 New York Times published an article about this new computer; STEVE JOBS: OUT FOR REVENGE By Phil Patton.
He has named this computer NeXT. ”What we want,” he [Steve Jobs] tells the audience, ”is to create the next computing revolution.” — New York Times
Eric knew he wanted to be part of that revolution, and he was.
In 1988, The NeXT Computer brought together the tools and technologies we use to make iPhone Apps today.
Eric tells us how the modern mobile world owes its very existence to this NeXT heritage.
Eric helps us understand how the very same tools and technologies first introduced by NeXT, such as Interface Builder and Object Oriented Programming are the true foundations of iOS and why they have remained largely unsurpassed for the past thirty years — a technological eternity.
These tools have evolved certainly, they have continued to be worked on by engineers of course — but take a step back and you can see that all the concepts, the very tools and technologies NeXT brought together in 1988, remain the standard, the cutting edge of App development today.
In creating Objective Technologies, Inc., Eric had really created one of the first software companies in history to vend Object Oriented Software components as a product.
Objective Technologies, Inc. (OTI) offered these object wares, along with all the other artist’s music, apps, components and digital works sold on the Electronic AppWrapper, the first App Store and the one Steve Jobs first saw in 1993. OTI advertised on the AppWrapper starting with V.1 No.1 in 1991. OTI continued to produce electronically distributed wares for every edition thereafter.
This new way of pre-manufacturing the rudimentary elements of object software —as a raw commercial product— had never been achieved before the NeXT Computer.
In reality, OTI wanted nothing short of changing the way software Apps are created, managed, licensed and sold; all through the power of Object Oriented Technology.
This was to be the very dawn of the App age.
The word “App” itself may descend from this architectural notion of a software platform built up from the consistent behaviors of object inheritance.
For Microsoft Windows you write programs; using the NeXT, you write Apps.
Now, for the very first time, the story of the digital revolution, history’s greatest computer and the technologies that engineers created which changed the world —is finally being told.
Come with us, as Eric takes us back to a time when there was no web to surf, and where the computer tools iPhone engineers rely upon today were first created.
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