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> At the time I was (coincidentally) using NeXTStep at work… > I was fourteen Wow. What's the story behind that?

• walrus01 9y ago
  Totally wild guess, but possibly faculty kid of somebody who worked at a university with a major EE/CS department, many of which had NeXT workstations at the time. NeXT workstations were really expensive and showed up in all sorts of places like astronomy departments. Same general environment and reason why Berners-Lee's workstation at CERN was NeXT.
  • qubex 9y ago
    Very close: my mother was an academic statistician and had a faculty NeXTCube at home that at one point she developed some business models for my father in Mathematica on. After she passed away the machine went back to the faculty but my father wanted to be abler to continue using the models he had come to understand and rely on, so he bought a NeXTStep-capable machine, licensed Mathematica and S on it, and roped me in since I was the most mathematically inclined in the family and was able to get a grip on how they worked, keep them up-to-date, adapt them when circumstances changed, and even improve them sometimes.
• qubex 9y ago
  Family business owned by my father (at the time). My mother had built a lot of business-related models for him on Mathematica running on her work workstation (a NeXTCube) . She passed away. I was the only person that understood anything about them so I was roped in to cope with them. A few years down the line the Cube (a 68030) became too slow and a succession of more powerful machines were purchased, up to a dual PentiumPro. It’s kind of an odd story, my use of ’work’ needed some explaining but I thought it would slow down the discussion to go off on a tangent lot narrate this story.
  • Cyberdog 9y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for sharing.