@EileenKCarpenter wow, did you know Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage personally?
@rphlegm
Lol, no. My husband actually got this.
Before there was a world wide web or Wikipedia, NeXT was training college professors with no programming experience to create educational software.
@rphlegm
They could use hyperlinks to let students learn more about a topic, and widgets that let the professor insert functions like buttons and sliders into the program. They had read-write 300 MB “floptical” discs that could store far more info than the magnetic media in use at the time.
Unfortunately, the hardware would have been a big investment for his institution, with little guarantee other professors would use it.
@EileenKCarpenter Carnegie Mellon University? I spent some time at the Software Engineering Institute there; back in the days when HTML was a new idea.
@rphlegm
But anyway, they flew him to Pittsburgh for the training, and Steve Jobs visited the class to demonstrate what it could do, with the students gathered around him at the workstation.