Comment by pjmlp

They were, and had it not been for Apple's reverse acquisition, it wouldn't be there in Xcode today.

My graduation thesis was porting a visualization particles engine from NeXTSTEP/Objective-C/OpenGL into Windows/Visual C++/OpenGL, as the department was seeing the end of NeXT and they wanted to keep the research going on.

My supervisor had a NeXT Cube getting dust on the office corner, waiting to be collected.