Editing OpenStep (section)

=== OPENSTEP for Mach ===
NeXT's first operating system was [[NeXTSTEP]], a sophisticated Mach-UNIX based operating system that originally ran only on NeXT's [[Motorola 68000 family|Motorola 68k]]-based workstations and that was then ported to run on [[IA-32|32-bit Intel x86]]-based [[IBM PC compatible|"IBM-compatible" personal computers]], [[PA-RISC]]-based workstations from [[Hewlett-Packard]], and [[SPARC]]-based workstations from [[Sun Microsystems]].

NeXT completed an implementation of OpenStep on their existing Mach-based OS and called it '''OPENSTEP for Mach''' 4.0 (July, 1996), 4.1 (December, 1996), and 4.2 (January, 1997). It was, for all intents, NeXTSTEP 4.0, and still retained flagship NeXTSTEP technologies (such as [[Display PostScript|DPS]], UNIX underpinnings, user interface characteristics like the [[Dock (computing)|Dock]] and [[Shelf (computing)|Shelf]], and so on), and retained the classic NeXTSTEP user interface and styles. OPENSTEP for Mach was further improved, in comparison to NeXTSTEP 3.3, with vastly improved driver support &ndash; however the environment to actually write drivers was changed with the introduction of the object-oriented DriverKit.

OPENSTEP for Mach supported Intel x86-based PC's, Sun's SPARC workstations, and NeXT's own 68k-based architectures, while the HP PA-RISC version was dropped. These versions continued to run on the underlying Mach-based OS used in NeXTSTEP. OPENSTEP for Mach became NeXT's primary OS from 1995 on, and was used mainly on the Intel platform. In addition to being a complete OpenStep implementation, the system was delivered with a complete set of NeXTSTEP libraries for backward compatibility. This was an easy thing to do in OpenStep due to library versioning, and OPENSTEP did not suffer in bloat because of it.