NeXT Nostalgia

Like Andreas, I'm a big fan of '90s user interfaces, though my heart is with NeXTSTEP, not Windows 95.

Rose went all-in on NeXT several years before I started there, and there were still several NeXT labs while I was a student. Curriculum-wise, Rose had largely moved on from them, but lots of cubes and pizza boxes were scattered about campus and they were very fun to play with.

Much of the shape of my subsequent life on Unix or Unix-like operating systems came from that time. NeXT was the platform on which I first used Emacs and it was where I first used tcsh as my shell. (I did eventually switch to zsh, but not until 2019 or so.)

Of course, Apple bought NeXT in 1996, which brought SJ home. NeXTSTEP became the basis of Mac OS X, and is still the basis of macOS today. There's a very real sense in which I never stopped using NeXTSTEP. I find that oddly comforting.