[lobrien]

Actually it wasn't as revelatory as you might think.

Windows programming was irrelevant in the 80s -- it wasn't until Windows 3 and 3.1 that it really caught on. In the DOS world there were lots of "character-mode windowing libraries" (I mean lots : I think we once reviewed 15 in a single issue of Computer Language) and they all generally had fairly straightforward programming models. People were much more focused on, for instance, memory management.

When NeXTSTEP came out, word traveled by the magazines and BBSes and Compuserve fora. You couldn't really communicate the NeXTSTEP programming model in pictures and so the only people who I think really got NeXTSTEP were people who'd already experienced Smalltalk! (Which, at the time, was at it's peak, with Smalltalk/V available on DOS machines and ParcPlace available on UNIX systems.)