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What's NeXT? Software, Psychedelics and the Origins of OS X & iOS - Andrew C Stone @twittelator | 6 | ||||
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 4 months later in September 1989, we have TextArt version 1.0 ready to ship for NeXTStep 0.9 - it's the first independently produced third party application for the NeXT, so we fly out to San Francisco to demo to Steve. 
I'd gotten the vibe from NeXT Camp that these guys were pretty into the corporate look (which initially was a real shock to me since I had heard the 70's Steve stories) so I arrived in a dark blue suit wearing an Hermes tie in a Windsor knot, just in case. I was nervous, and I remember how he stormed into the room, so I knew it was no time for pleasantries, just business. I quickly demoed the software to Steve and he didn't diss it. He says, "This is great! You should sell this for $49". I replied, "The Optical Media it comes on costs us $49, how can we?". "How would you like to build a flatfile database for the NeXT, akin to Filemaker?" What? How had it come to be that Steve Jobs was asking a New Mexican cyberpunk hippie to build something that important for the platform? Basically, almost none of the successful Macintosh software houses had gotten excited about the NeXT, so Steve had to recruit all new players. 
And thus began a great software challenge. Being object-oriented, we based both Create (TextArt's successor) and the database maker DataPhile on one set of objects so all the drawing functions would be available to DataPhile.These were some of the first power apps for the NeXT and they sold very well. Create is in version 14.4 and I'm still using it on Mac OS X today. DataPhile made us, as Steve had promised, a lot of money | |||||
