In many ways NeXTSTEP can be thought of as a “pragmatic Smalltalk environment” that traded some of Smalltalk’s dynamism for improved compatibility with the Unix ecosystem. Recall that NeXT’s original target market was higher education, which even in the 1980s started relying on Unix. This was the era of the Unix workstation, and NeXT can be considered a competitor to Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, and other Unix workstation vendors. NeXT’s differentiator was its Smalltalk-inspired object-oriented environment, built on Objective-C.

I wonder, though, what a pure Smalltalk workstation would’ve looked like, and what hardware would’ve been necessary to make it fast. After all, the late 80s were the era of Lisp machines, though Lisp machines were much more expensive than NeXT cubes ever were. If I recall correctly, Smalltalk on the Xerox Alto was slow, but David Patterson (of RISC fame) had a PhD student who worked on a performant version of the Smalltalk VM, and some of that work went to a spiritual successor named Self, which heavily influenced the design of the Java VM. I remember Java feeling slow in the mid-1990s, but that might be due to bad memories of Java applets rather than a fundamental problem with Java VMs.