For a while back 20ish years ago I worked at Apple with a team that had been NeXT developer support team for WebObjects and related things. They did OpenSTEP/black hardware support when I got there, and I still have some nice NeXT ephemera. I had a personal Turbo Color NextStation (called "the slab" by NeXT users) running NextSTEP 3.3 and OpenSTEP 4.2 + Y2K patches that I ran on Apple's corporate LAN in the late '90s and early 2000s.
It had a static IP and hostname and was bound to the corporate NetInfo domain and it was really nice to work with and really was a window into what would be Mac OS X. At one point I was running Rhapsody on a PowerMac G3 which still supported remote displays with -NXHost, running the app on slab with the UI on that thing. Mail.app bound to NetInfo was useful, the browsers were still being updated, and while setup took a lot of hand compiles, it was a really fun setup for a while.
Eventually they migrated from NetInfo to Open Directory, then dropped NetInfo support. The -NXHost remote windowing was based on Display PostSript, which was dropped with Mac OS X, and the slab got to be more limited, esp. with SSL/TLS evolving, and eventually it went into storage.
These days it's not useful on the modern web and I wanted to give it to a good home so about a year ago I traded it for help from a friend who's good with hardware for repairing/recapping an SE/30 I've had longer than the slab. Happy to see the slab and the SE/30 running again, they were both greats of their era.
I worked in a WebObjects shop that was combination of Sun, windows, NeXT, and eventually Mac OS Server 1. That shop was the best run shop I ever saw. The Sun was server running NIS, SMB, NFS. The NeXT and Mac OS Server machines NetInfo could be bound to NIS and shares were distributed using NFS or SMB. We also had NetAtalk configured for Mac OS 9 and lower.
I have been trying to emulate that shop ever since.
It had a static IP and hostname and was bound to the corporate NetInfo domain and it was really nice to work with and really was a window into what would be Mac OS X. At one point I was running Rhapsody on a PowerMac G3 which still supported remote displays with -NXHost, running the app on slab with the UI on that thing. Mail.app bound to NetInfo was useful, the browsers were still being updated, and while setup took a lot of hand compiles, it was a really fun setup for a while.
Eventually they migrated from NetInfo to Open Directory, then dropped NetInfo support. The -NXHost remote windowing was based on Display PostSript, which was dropped with Mac OS X, and the slab got to be more limited, esp. with SSL/TLS evolving, and eventually it went into storage.
These days it's not useful on the modern web and I wanted to give it to a good home so about a year ago I traded it for help from a friend who's good with hardware for repairing/recapping an SE/30 I've had longer than the slab. Happy to see the slab and the SE/30 running again, they were both greats of their era.