1980 to 1989: The Rise of Personal Computers and Personal Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 210

Note
ITT sold its telecommunications business to Alcatel, which closed
down the U.S. research labs in Shelton, Connecticut, and Stratford,
Connecticut. I had worked at the ITT research lab in Stratford and
his wife, whom he met while at ITT, had worked at the ITT re-
search lab in nearby Shelton. The Shelton lab was a telecommunic-
ations research laboratory and the Stratford lab was a software en-
gineering technology center. Tom Love was the Director of the Ad-
vanced Technology Group at the Programming Technology Center
(PTC), and he hired Brad Cox into that group at ITT.
The main product of Stepstone Corporation was a powerful object-oriented
programming language called Objective-C. The ideas for this language started at
ITT and were stimulated by the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine , which was
devoted to Smalltalk. Brad Cox saw the opportunity to develop an extension of the
C programming language based upon reading this magazine. His ITT work was
published as a 1983 SigPlan Notices paper titled “The Object-Oriented Precom-
piler: Programming Smalltalk—80 Methods in C Language.” This original lan-
guage was referred to as OOPC. A second generation of the language was built
from scratch at Schlumberger Research and then a third language was built from
scratch at a startup company started by Tom Love and Brad Cox called Productiv-
ity Products in June 1983.
The Objective-C language became one of the most important languages in
the software industry when Steve Jobs and his technical staff decided to make
Objective-C the primary language for all Apple software products (which came
about because Steve Jobs had selected Objective-C for the NeXT computer and its
operating system, as discussed in the section on NeXT).
One might think that having Apple (and NeXT) select the language as a key
tool for all future products such as the Macintosh operating system, the iPad, the
iPhone, and others would be sufficient to catapult Stepstone to Fortune 500 status.
This might have happened had the original agreement between NeXT and the
Stepstone Corporation stayed in effect, because it called for a payment of $5 to
Stepstone for every Apple device or workstation that contained Objective-C code.
However, Stepstone had received venture funding, and contracts were no
longer in the hands of the founders but rather in the hands of officers selected by
the venture capitalists. For reasons that do not make any business sense, NeXT