Huh, I think I knew in the recesses of my mind that macOS (né Mac OS X) is basically descendant from NeXTSTEP, the operating system NeXT used for its computers – NeXT being the company Steve Jobs founded when he left Apple in the late 80s / early 90s, and which was in many ways "resorbed" into Apple upon Jobs' return to Apple in 1997. (NeXTSTEP is itself a sort of BSD derivative.)

What I did not know until today is that we have NeXTSTEP to thank for the weird sort-of-like-JSON-but-not-quite-JSON "property list" file format, which app preferences are stored in on macOS to this fucking day 🤯

Holy Choices-Locked-In-For-Bizarre-Reasons, Batman!!

#Apple #NeXT #NeXTSTEP #BSD #Darwin #MachKernel #plist