In the summer of 1989, I had a really, really tough assignment: I had to evaluate the NeXT Cube for a publishing company. What a hardship to have that black box on my desk, along with that 400-dpi laser printer! I don't know how I ever managed.

It's hard to believe that it was ten years ago, on 12/20/1996, that we welcomed Steve Jobs and NeXT Computers back into the Apple family. Legendary game developer John Romero remembers, and he's got a fascinating post up about the role of NeXT in bringing his babies to market.

According to Romero, the original development environment for both Doom and Quake was NeXTSTEP; in fact, the first four years of id Software's efforts were on NeXT. He fondly remembers the days of simultaneously building for three different architectures, and side-by-side map editing across the LAN with cofounder John Carmack.

Romero ends his post by noting that he spent the 15 years prior to 1996 working on computers built by Steve Jobs, and that "maybe someday I'll get one of those kickass iMacs." Cue the salivary glands of Mac gamers everywhere...

[via IMG]