Getting Back to OS X’s Roots
You may think you’ve got serious OS X geek cred if, for example, you’ve been using OS X since the developer previews, but chances are my good Colorado friend Chris Jones has you beat. Not content to simply experience OS X in its present form, Chris recently fulfilled a longtime ambition by purchasing a sleek black NeXT slab running OS X and Cocoa’s venerable predecessor, OpenStep. Oddly enough, Chris didn’t have to look far to get his slice of vintage early 90s computing, since the number one (remaining) reseller of NeXT equipment happens to be based about 15 minutes from where Chris and I used to work in the Denver Tech Center.
Never having used NeXTSTEP or OpenStep myself, I’ll be curious to hear about Chris’s impressions as a modern day OS X user (I had no idea, for example, that OS X’s anthropomorphic, head shaking login window had its roots with NeXT). Maybe if he can find it, he can even get Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original WorldWideWeb browser (a NeXTSTEP app) running!