Arguably, NeXT was the mother of today’s Apple. The old Apple bought NeXT along with Jobs, and the new products were basically NeXT technology with an Apple logo.
This is why everything in the Mac and iOS SDK is prefixed with NS - think it stands for NeXT Step?
Could also be NeXT/SUN–but there's clearly a NeXT in there either way.
You are correct - the NS* stands for "Next/Sun" ...
Does anyone have a counterpoint to this? I've heard both, so I'm curious if any one is "more correct".
I've heard both too, but I've seen docs that refer to the "NextSTEP/Sun" namespace .. somewhere buried deep in the Apple docs .. but I can't find it now. Either way, both "NextSTEP" and "NextSTEP/SUN" have been used to answer this question in the past, so I'd say both are correct .. especially since Sun left the project early.
NeXT is definitely the mother of today's Apple. OSX is the NeXT operating system and application stack repackaged with the Mac look-and-feel. More importantly, Steve put the entire NeXT management team in all the VP roles at Apple, where they were in charge of reworking the entire Apple software stack. iOS is a stripped-down version of OSX.