The really amazing thing was how after SJ returned to Apple, for a couple of years, the Apple Dev Keynotes were just re-hashing of previous NeXT keynote addresses.
It still kills me that Adobe reneged on their promise of a free Display PostScript license, thus killing Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" for Windows (and it's still hilarious to me that that colour was named for Bill Gate's rude response when asked if Microsoft would develop software for NeXT, "Develop for it? I'll p** on it."
As for Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" for Windows dying, not sure if it would make a difference, OpenSTEP also did not work out that well, not even for Sun, other than being an influence to Java and Java EE (originally an Objective- C framework).
By the way, my graduation thesis was porting an OpenGL based particle engine from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because the university department was getting rid of their Cubes, at this time there were no hopes for NeXT.
Yes, bit there could have been new life if all the NeXT devs had gotten their promised entrée into the Windows market as scheduled. Anderson Financial Services in particular were looking forward to a big payout for selling PasteUp.app license.
The notable NeXT code considerations at Adobe are:
- they lost the source code to Glenn Reid's nifty "TouchType.app"
- they couldn't be bothered to revive the NeXT source code for Altsys Virtuoso which Macromedia Freehand was based on
It still kills me that Adobe reneged on their promise of a free Display PostScript license, thus killing Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" for Windows (and it's still hilarious to me that that colour was named for Bill Gate's rude response when asked if Microsoft would develop software for NeXT, "Develop for it? I'll p** on it."