Cocoa and Objective-C are at the heart of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. Although Mac OS X is relatively new, Objective-C and Cocoa are much older. Brad Cox invented Objective-C in the early 1980s to meld the popular and portable C language with the elegant Smalltalk language. In 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, Inc., to create powerful, affordable workstations. NeXT chose Unix as its operating system and created NextSTEP, a powerful user interface toolkit developed in Objective-C. Despite its features and a small, loyal following, NextSTEP achieved little commercial success.
When Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 (or was it the other way around?), NextSTEP was renamed Cocoa and brought to the wider audience of Macintosh programmers. Apple gives away its development tools—including Cocoa—for free, so any Mac programmer can take advantage of them. All you need is a bit of programming experience, basic knowledge of Objective-C, and the desire to dig in and learn stuff.
From "Learn Objective-C on the Mac"
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/objective-c/9781430218159/hello/what_apostrophy_s_coming_up
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