Mastodawn

Ah, WebObjects. This set of software frameworks was used to build enterprise-level websites, the iTunes Store being a notable example. 4.5 was the first version to "only" cost $699 instead of the $50,000 that NeXT used to charge. And the last version to use Objective-C... it all got rewritten in Java for the 5.0 release, beginning a slow decline until it was officially discontinued in 2016.

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Bill Lloyd

@_the_cloud Did you ever get to tour the VG3 data center when it had the tray loader Xserves? They were the only ones that could run WebObjects 4.5.1 after the Java version was released, so that whole data center had racks and racks of them (visible from the lobby, behind a glass wall) as the App Store front end. For years. They were SO LOUD.

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Ken McLeod Mar 10

@wklj No, never got that tour. There was a rack of Xserves in a server closet in IL1 and that was loud enough; I'd imagine you'd need hearing protection going into a data center full of them.

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Bill Lloyd Mar 10

@_the_cloud Indeed, lol. And a lot of the rest of the data center at the time (this was 20+ years ago) was running HPUX and AIX, etc., but that was also all behind the wall of Xserves at the front which was like 20 racks of them, but you couldn't see anything but the Xserves through the glass. No surprise, really :-)