> the rise and fall of the NeXT platform

In a very real sense, the NeXT platform never fell. It just changed its name to Mac OS X. Apple still ships Chess.app and TextEdit.app which can be launched from Dock.app, and you might see a spinning beachball cursor while it loads.

While it was kind of interesting, very few people really could use it, my graduation thesis was porting a particle visualisation framework from Objective-C, NeXTSTEP into C++, Windows, because the department was getting rid of their Cubes.

This was one or two years before Apple's deal, when no one had big hopes for NeXT's future.