I was hooked at 0.7, an employee by 2.1 2/20/2004 2:19 PM
I started messing with NeXTstep on OD with 0.7. Ah those were the days. Then 
I got a slab with 2.0. The following summer, '91, I was hired into the DST 
Group. Soon there after, an intel employee and a white box appeared on a 
table outside my office. I was confused. I chatted it up with him and found 
out that we were porting to x86. Cool. That'll kill Microsoft for sure. Um. 
Maybe not. Then later with the introduction of OpenStep for SPARC, PA-RISC 
and then the Motorola 88110 (for the NeXT RISC Workstation, which did exist) 
and later the introduction of OpenStep on WinNT I was absolutely convenced 
that we had won. Still, it was not to be. So, I decided to fight. I joined 
Sun and the OpenStep for Solaris group. That'll show 'em! We burned the 
midnight oil, created many releases but never shipped it publicly. Want to 
know why? The legacy desktop group in Sun (the one that did all that 
wonderful Motif work) had more friends higher up than we did. I was tired at 
this point and some friends at Sun told me about Oak, er I mean Java. So the 
group who did OpenStep for Solaris (a blend of the former Lighthouse Design 
company and some forward thinking internal Sun folks) moved over to JavaSoft 
and recreated all of the Lighthouse applicatons as well as the OpenStep l&f 
as Java. This time we had them. And it was fast. This was killed again by 
politics and the OpenOffice crap that we have today. A few friends remain in 
JavaSoft at Sun telling me dark sad stories. Hang on guys. You do good work. 
Anyway, the time after NeXT was dying and before the Apple inverse-takeover I 
lovingly call "The Dark Ages" because it sucked. I had to use Win95 or NT on 
a daily basis. I looked at Linux and found it kludgy. I used BSD*OS most of 
the time a very stable and fast OS. TWM as a window manager, the most crappy 
of crappy window managers. If things were going to be bad, then why not go to 
the bottom. I looked at BeOS, it was nifty. I liked the blinking lights. The 
moral? OS/X has saved my soul.