A company I worked for sent me along with two senior colleagues to a shop which was showing both the NeXT cube and the NeXTStep system ported on x86 hardware, and the experience was totally worth the early morning (late night) wake up plus following 5 hours train trip; it was about 1993 or 1994. The cube was absolutely gorgeous looking, and being then myself an Amiga fan its Motorola CPU to me was something to be proud of.The demonstration wasn't the usual smoke and mirrors wrapped in corporate speech: the guy wrote some code on the cube and built a small GUI program to show the development system and libraries, then he took the same code, copied it to a x86 machine nearby running the ported OS and built it to obtain the same program. Just wow! Back then running different hardware and CPU architectures meant sort of living on a different planet, and we just saw someone building a space bridge between two distant planets, making software development much easier.![Openstep Installation Instructions Openstep Installation Instructions](/uploads/1/1/9/0/119010578/385366251.png)
OPENSTEP for Mach supports multiple partitioned hard disks, allowing the user to install and boot several operating systems from the same local hard disk. Larger local disks are recommended for stand-alone systems or for systems with a local non-OPENSTEP for Mach partition. NeXTStep and OpenStep used to provide you with adaptors for Sybase and Oracle, that is an interface to query databases from these editors. GNUstep offers you the same for free (under NeXTStep or OpenStep, you needed the developer kit which was quite expensive, but you had the Enterprise Object Foundation for free - a lot of examples).
![Openstep Installation Instructions Openstep Installation Instructions](/uploads/1/1/9/0/119010578/385366251.png)
We eventually got back with some promo material and the idea that we were did indeed experience a milestone in the IT development, but the price tag was something a very small company could not invest for research alone, so they abandoned the idea.
Openstep Installation Instructions Installation
About WindowMaker: I loved it and used it extensively both at home and work in the early 2k. In one project I had to build the simplest possible user interface for roughly 50 remote stations hundreds of kilometers away where the users were mostly completely new to computers, therefore the risk of clogging the support seat with panic calls was really high.Luckily WindowMaker and its kiosk mode came to rescue: I built a really basic desktop screen in which the user could not alter the system in any way, providing buttons for simple tasks like running a browser, fetch or send mail using a client, ask for remote support, print documents we sent through scp or mail attachments, shutdown/reboot etc.An interesting challenge was easing the support login since all those terminals had dynamic IP, and we simply couldn't ask to the operators to start a reverse ssh from their side, but thanks to some Ruby scripts in the background, each remote machine would obtain and send its public IP and some more information to the local server in which a Ruby+Glade GTK app would add them to a list, so that the support operator would click on a station name and the ssh to that machine would open in seconds.In the end it worked so well that the support colleague spent most of her time twiddling thumbs.