Not just OpenStep, but Rhapsody! It was Apple's original transition plan for Mac OS X, basically OpenStep/Mach 5.x with a Mac OS 8-style Platinum UI done in NeXT-style Display PostScript complete with draggable menus. It's my favorite Apple product of all time just for the "what could have been" factor, but the Adobes of the world balked at "rewrite your apps in Yellow Box" so we got Carbon and friends in the rebooted Mac OS X project. There was one retail release as "Mac OS X Server 1.0", but the "Premier" desktop-user-focused version was canceled. I like to run Rhapsody on my Power Mac G3 Blue&White because that particular machine shipped with Rhapsody (in a Server G3 configuration) and is extremely well supported: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-201...
And here are some good starting points for more info:
It was actually fun to use. I had NeXTSTEP 3.3 and then 4.x with the developer tools back in 95. I was in love with PostScript and Objective-C so this was my favorite computer. I had it running on a custom Pentium 90mhz system. It was so easy to process data on that thing.
I agree! Circa 1998, I got a tip from a friend in university IT and "rescued" a few NeXTstations and associated peripherals (displays, mice, keyboards) from an Indiana University dumpster. I emailed NeXT, and they were nice enough to send me complete software kits for both NeXTSTEP 3.3 and OPENSTEP 4.2 (all platforms) at no charge.
The monochrome displays, in particular, were lovely, and, in spite of its outdated CPU (25MHz 040 IIRC), one of these machines, running NeXTSTEP 3.3, was my primary workstation for terminal-centric work for the next couple years.
While I never did get much into Objective-C beyond the basics, as a big PostScript fan since the red/green/blue book days, I did have a bit of fun with Display PostScript (and NeWS on the SPARCstation 1 the NeXTstation ultimately shared a desk with, although, quite unlike the NeXTstation, the Sun was nearly unusably slow for day-to-day GUI use).
Similar story. I was walking through the Physics building at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2004 and a brilliant looking black cube of a computer caught my eye. It was lined up along a wall with a bunch of drab, old computer equipment destined for the trash heap. This was before the era of web-connected phones, so I quickly peeked at the back sticker for some information (model, serial, etc.) and went back to my dorm and looked up what it could be. It was a NeXTcube, which I had never known about. So I hustled back with an empty backpack and managed to cram it in with the zippers barely holding it in and walked back to my dorm. Once I got back and took it apart and was amazed at the quality. I never booted it up, but I kept it for a year or so before selling it on eBay to a person named Chuck (vintagecomputermuseum) for $300. I really should check-in with them and see if they ever got it up and running.
