I met John Romero and American McGee back in the early 1990's as they were just finished with Doom II. John Carmack had some other obligation (sad, cuz he was the main developer), but Romero was pretty smart too - had plenty of insight into the space rendering mechanics and such and both were more than happy to share what they new, what they were working on, and gab about space and time :). I also remember that they were bemoaning having to give up their NeXT boxes for racks and racks of some other machine to do equivalent work (at the time, I was completely clueless as to what they were talking about). With decades behind, I have a clue about one workstation being oh so powerful and about server farms doing rendering, but I really don't know nothing about NeXT, it's boxes, or what I'm really wondering about - its relationship with unix (although I'm pretty sure there is one). I know that Sun was working with them on OpenStep and OpenStep and the NeXT cube were predecessors to my favorite contemporary system (my Mac), but that's about it. So, how does NeXT fit into the unix world? And was it all that? I remember after talking to them that I really, really wanted one...id Software is a perfect example of the fact that you can open source your stuff once it has done market rounds and still be wildly successful and a household name. It helps that John Carmack himself was very principled about that sort of thing, not only contributing engines as open source projects but designing them specifically to be easy to modify and extend. The WAD is as responsible for the success of doom as source availability methinks.