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Steve Jobs had been ousted from Apple in 1986 and with a small cadre of loyal engineers began to build the next great thing, which began to build hype in late 1988 - it was the coming together of three of my favorite things: the Mac's UI, the industrial strength UNIX OS and the display model of PostScript. The NeXT community was born, and it was on comp.sys.next.
One lament that Bill Parkhurst, one of the 4 original AppKit developers for the NeXT Computer, had was that the Mac was easy to use but terrifying difficult to program. But it was the NeXT with it's Interface Builder that would allow regular people to make cool software.
In March 1989, two guys from NeXT - dressed like Mormon missionaries in white shirts and black ties - gave a demo at UNM, and I was hooked. The president of Applequerque, Kris Jensen, and I got them to demo to our mac users group that evening. They took us out to a fancy dinner and they convinced us to become developers for the Black CUBE.
Here was a chance to be on the ground floor of something new, and something profound, and I wanted in. The black magnesium cube was a ghastly 10K and the
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