Wired News: NeXT Fans Give Up the Ghost
Guess what…More on the NeXT. The Bay Area NeXT Group (BANG) finally disappeared in 2005.
The NeXT computer was a groundbreaking pc design, pioneering things like optical drives, large displays.
One amazing aspect was the system came bundled with a huge amount of software, including software development tools and a soft library that included the complete works of William Shakespeare.
NeXT computer struggled selling less than 50,000 units, and they stopped producing hardware in the early 90-ies. The operating system NeXTSTEP lived on, and was ported to the Intel platform. Finally NeXT was acquired by Apple, and NeXTSTEP became the foundation of OS X.
NeXTSTEP also lives on in the Open Source project, GNUSTEP. A very interesting project, and there’s no doubt that the NeXTSTEP frameworks and development tools are very good and productive, but the GUI is definitely showing it’s age.