illumineX

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.“— Steve Jobs
Today, Steve Jobs (1955-2011) would have celebrated his 63rd birthday.

On February 11, 1993 NeXT announced they would no longer make and sell their sleek black computers the NeXTcube and related family of "pizza box" workstations known as NeXTstation. Three hundred people were fired and the company reformed around a software strategy based on pitching their operating system and object-oriented software developer tools known collectively as NeXTSTEP, for various  hardware platforms including PA-RISC, SPARC, and Intel x86.  In addition to providing their OS on other hardware platforms, the company worked with partners including Sun and Microsoft to layer their developer tools on other platforms including OpenStep for Solaris and OpenStep for Windows (sometimes known as "Yellow Box").

Known by the community of NeXT enthusiasts wryly as "Black Monday" this transition led to some amusing footnotes in the history of computing. One Wall Street firm, AIG Trading, didn't pick up the advanced (but probably very subtle) hints offere…