Apple, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, quickly became a leader in personal computing. In 1979, Jobs and several Apple employees visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to learn about Xerox’s desktop computer that featured a graphical user interface (GUI). That GUI served as the inspiration for the Apple Macintosh, launched with much fanfare in a memorable Super Bowl ad in 1984.
The Objective-C programming language, created by Brad Cox and Tom Love at Stepstone in the early 1980s, added capabilities for object-oriented programming (OOP) to the C programming language. At the time of this writing, Objective-C was comparable in popularity to C++.1 Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and founded NeXT Inc. In 1988, NeXT licensed Objective-C from StepStone and developed an Objective-C compiler and libraries which were used as the platform for the NeXTSTEP operating system’s user interface and Interface Builder—used to construct graphical user interfaces.
1. www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
.
Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Apple’s OS X operating system is a descendant of NeXTSTEP. Apple’s proprietary operating system, iOS, is derived from Apple’s OS X and is used in the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.