Those Windows images are back from the days, when NeXT was porting Cocoa (YellowBox) to Windows - if you dig through the Internet really well, you can find some betas of it, though I never got it to work that well...

Are you sure about those Windows 95 icons? I seem to remember thinking how Microsoft's Windows 95 looked a lot like NeXTSTEP when it shipped (NeXTSTEP dates from a time before Windows 95) and a lot of the Win'95 look was "lifted" from NeXTSTEP. I think you might be seeing yet more icons from NeXTSTEP, the control buttons from windows (with a small 'w') looked mighty similar, as did the buttons on scrollbars.

I would imagine those old icons are there not to ease porting between NeXTSTEP and Cocoa, but because Cocoa *is* NeXTSTEP. The Windows controls are probably in there from their brief foray into being a cross platform toolkit.

The Windows bitmaps are presumably left over from when Jobs' tried to pitch Nextstep to Microsoft in the 1990s as a better foundation for future versions of Windows. Isn't there a Windows API lurking in OS X somewhere?

"In addition to a wide variety of NeXT icons, you'll also find a full complement of - horror of horrors! - Windows bitmaps. It's enough to make any self-respecting Mac developer cringe but - yes - they're there!"

And @AppleService 42 Boot .... with Future Memories ReVisited Live in AIdDirectIONS......... Magical Mystery Turing Trips and Jobs for the Boys are Back in Tune and Turned On.

I Kid U Not.

Root Source HyperRadioProActivity via Tempestuous Mars and Sublime Venus Channels.

...... and for Seventh Heavens too, the WAI.

You have Controls, Tim BL, for CyberFlight. Care to Dare XXXXercise them in 42 Win Win Territory. Do Wwwe Require AIManual?

The Windows iconset probably dates back to the NT port of OPENSTEP back when NeXT had gone all software and were porting their dev environment to various platforms (Solaris amongst them).

Briefly, NEXTSTEP as OPENSTEP was on Windows NT, was it not?

It's amazing this crap doesn't get taken out. It's interesting and all but seriously with a company the size of Apple why haven't they spent a little bit of time to remove what they don't require.

I don't know what most people's view of Snow Leopard is but I for one I'm happy and surprised that Apple have spent the time to do this.

Microsoft could learn from this.

Back in the early development of MacOS X (Rhapsody at the time) there was a project called yellow box that would allow Rhapsody apps to be compiled and work on Windows (I ran it on Win2k).

Hi John. I agree that it's a bit surprising all that stuff is still in there. But a lot of the really old icons are pretty poor quality by today's standards, and hence small. Taking 'em out wouldn't buy all that much disk space. A drop in the ocean compared to -- for example -- all the built in foreign language support.

Dave