What experiences and stories do any of you have with NeXT, the company?
When I got my NeXTstation Color, it had come from a lab and been surplussed for some reason..this was in 1994/95 sometime. It came with the soundbox and monitor, but no media or documentation, and it still had NeXTstep installed but I didn't have the passwords. I called NeXT and after discussing it with them and explaining the situation and that I was the owner, they then walked me thru resetting things.
This was my only dealing with the company itself. I had wanted a NeXT since stories about them started circulating, so was thrilled to come up with this NeXTstation.
From the time I was a senior in high school (1995) through 2nd year of college, I ran a webcam (later, two of them) out of my dorm room. Before anyone asks, no, it wasn't an X-rated thing, just something that was neat and technically not trivial at the time. Took a new picture every time someone loaded the page, and had a simple chat along with it.
Some time in mid 96, we were contacted by someone at NeXT who wanted to send us free software (WebObjects and OPENSTEP) and maybe some cash in order to convert the site to NeXT technology so we would be a demo site. They sent us the OPENSTEP Enterprise for NT, but we had no interest in doing anything in Windows. Our contact assured us we'd get OPENSTEP Mach to run on an Intel machine, but unfortunately NeXT was bought before they got around to that and so that fizzled. Our contact left the company right away - though maybe he was just fired for silly ideas like having kids in Indiana be a WebObjects demo site.
And so we continued to run it on Linux/Apache/hacked up quickcam drivers.