20 years in IT history: Connectivity

Steve Jobs's NeXTCube

Where traditional programming focused on logical operations (computing), OOP's great strength was the management of categories or classes, including hierarchies of classes. This made it possible to write programs that pulled more kinds of things (humans, structures, classes, data) into a given computing environment without forcing the programmer to rewrite these environments from scratch. OOP was a programming language for connection machines.

The totally cool but closed hardware totally failed, while OOP went on to become bigger than the Next computer itself could have ever been. Today, many important computing languages (Java, C++, PERL, SmallTalk, among others) come with an OOP toolbox.

1989: Netware 3

The first customers of micros, largely programmer types, found ways to use their new toys on the job. As collections of these machines aggregated at various institutes and centers, the idea inevitably occurred to their owners that it would be neat to be able to hook everybody's micro together (and to the main system).