Stepstone

For other uses, see Stepstone (disambiguation) or Stepping stone (disambiguation)

The former firehouse factory at 75 Glen Road, Sandy Hook, CT where Stepstone was housed in the late 1980s

Stepstone, originally named Productivity Products International (PPI), was a software company founded in 1983 by Brad Cox and Tom Love, best known for releasing the original version of the Objective-C programming language.

PPI/Stepstone enjoyed modest success not only supplying semi-"object oriented" software, but also among those who wanted an ANSI C compiler on platforms that didn't otherwise support one — the Objective-C compiler spit out code to be fed to the native C compiler, which often was K&R C. The ICpak 201 interface toolkit was submitted to the Open Software Foundation as a candidate for their interface standard but was not expected to win over Motif.

In April 1995, NeXT acquired the Objective-C trademark and rights from Stepstone. At the same time, Stepstone licensed back from NeXT the right to continue selling their Objective-C based products. The U.S. software company Stepstone appears to have gone out of business in the early 2000s.