苹果的开发者文档如下:

Historical Note: If you’re wondering why so many of the classes you encounter have an NS prefix, it’s because of the past history of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Cocoa began life as the collected frameworks used to build apps for the NeXTStep operating system. When Apple purchased NeXT back in 1996, much of NeXTStep was incorporated into OS X, including the existing class names. Cocoa Touch was introduced as the iOS equivalent of Cocoa; some classes are available in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, though there are also a large number of classes unique to each platform. Two-letter prefixes like NS and UI (for User Interface elements on iOS) are reserved for use by Apple.

来源:使用Objective-C编程

它来自NeXTSTEP传统。

NeXTSTEP或NeXTSTEP/Sun取决于你问的是谁。

有一段时间，Sun在OpenStep上有相当大的投资。在Sun加入之前，基金会中的大多数东西，尽管当时还不叫基金会，前缀都是NX，代表NeXT，在Sun加入之前的某个时候，所有东西都被重命名为NS。S很可能并不代表Sun，但在Sun加入后，人们普遍认为它代表Sun，以纪念他们的参与。

实际上我有一个参考资料，但我现在找不到。如果/当我再次找到它时，我会更新这篇文章。

苹果的开发者文档如下:

Historical Note: If you’re wondering why so many of the classes you encounter have an NS prefix, it’s because of the past history of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Cocoa began life as the collected frameworks used to build apps for the NeXTStep operating system. When Apple purchased NeXT back in 1996, much of NeXTStep was incorporated into OS X, including the existing class names. Cocoa Touch was introduced as the iOS equivalent of Cocoa; some classes are available in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, though there are also a large number of classes unique to each platform. Two-letter prefixes like NS and UI (for User Interface elements on iOS) are reserved for use by Apple.

来源:使用Objective-C编程

来自Cocoa_(API)维基百科:

(重点)

Cocoa classes begin with the acronym "NS" (standing either for the NeXT-Sun creation of OpenStep, or for the original proprietary term for the OpenStep framework, NeXTSTEP): NSString, NSArray, etc. Foundation Kit, or more commonly simply Foundation, first appeared in OpenStep. On Mac OS X, it is based on Core Foundation. Foundation is a generic object-oriented library providing string and value manipulation, containers and iteration, distributed computing, run loops, and other functions that are not directly tied to the graphical user interface. The "NS" prefix, used for all classes and constants in the framework, comes from Cocoa's OPENSTEP heritage, which was jointly developed by NeXT and Sun.

Cocoa框架的原始代码来自NeXTSTEP库基金会和AppKit(这些名称仍然被苹果的Cocoa框架使用)，NeXTSTEP的工程师选择用NS作为他们的符号前缀。

因为Objective-C是C的扩展，因此不像c++那样有名称空间，符号必须有一个唯一的前缀，这样它们就不会发生冲突。这对于在框架中定义的符号尤为重要。

如果您正在编写一个应用程序，以便您的代码可能只使用您的符号，那么您不必担心这个问题。但是如果您正在编写供他人使用的框架或库，您还应该为您的符号添加一个唯一的前缀。CocoaDev有一个页面，许多Cocoa社区的开发人员列出了他们“选择”的前缀。您可能也会发现这个SO讨论很有帮助。