[patrickgzill]

I would like you to explain a little more how C++ is more "cutting edge" than Obj-C, etc.

BSD is still used in Free/Open/Net/BSD; and Next's GUI was based on Display Postscript, which was easily tuned for PDF (PS and PDF are very similar languages)

What you will notice is that all of these choices were designed by very small teams, sometimes just 1 person was involved in the original design:

BSD - Bill Joy and a few others made the major design decisions

Next GUI - Keith Ohlfs, on top of DPS licensed from Adobe

Objective C - designed mainly by Brad Cox

You missed the Mach kernel, originally a small research project from CMU, Avie Tevanian worked on porting Mach to a multi-processor system in the early to mid 1980s.