When I joined NeXT one of my first assignments was to evaluate a new piece of software that we were considering releasing. It was software that would automatica

When I joined NeXT one of my first assignments was to evaluate a new piece of software that we were considering releasing. It was software that would automatically prompt you to sign up for an Internet connection when your new NeXT machine first booted. It communicated with Virginia to get the new machine an IP address. I ran it a bunch of times and it usually worked - but it would sometimes fail. And when it failed, we had no way to debug the problems on remote systems outside our control. And since there were monetary charges involved, this got very messy very quickly. Based on my strong report, Steve decided that NeXT boxes wouldn't automatically sign you up for an Internet connection - since we couldn't debug or support the customer when things went wrong. Candidly, I've looked back on that report and wondered if I set back the entire industry. We weren't looking at browsers - but we were looking at access to all communication possibilities across the Internet as well as the access to University and Government resources (ftp and remote mounts.)