John Romero celebrates the ten-year anniversary of when Apple bought over NeXT:

We were building fat binaries of the tools for all 3 processors in the office - one .app file that had code for all 3 processors in it and executed the right code depending on which machine you ran it on. All our data was stored on a Novell 3.11 server and we constantly used the NeXTSTEP Novell gateway object to transparently copy our files to and from the server as if it was a local NTFS drive. This was back in 1993!

Indeed: even the most modern Windows and Linux development environments today still feel far inferior to the NeXT platforms in many ways. I’m thankful that the superb technology from NeXT lives on to this day: when anyone argues that the object-oriented paradigm has failed, Cocoa is living proof that it can work, and deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in development productivity. It’s humbling to think that most of the libraries and frameworks that Mac OS X developers take for grated today existed a dozen years ago, before even Windows 95 was around. If you’re not convinced, watch Steve Jobs’s demo of NeXTSTEP version 3 running on a 50MHz cube — in 1991. Windows Presentation Foundation, Glade/GTK+ and Qt Designer look like stone-age tools compared to what NeXT had fifteen years ago.