The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make the Mac after all). Disappointed they couldn't have it, they went out, got a bottle of tequila and got drunk.

Half way through the bottle one of them said "You know what? We could build Smalltalk on top of UNIX!". and thus was born obj-c and Nextstep.

There are still things that nextstep is more than ahead of the bleeding edge with. Time tends to erase perspective. Here's an example:

    // get a connection to some server
    id server = [NXConnection connectToName: "exampleserver"];

    // Then use objects on that server.
    List *aList;
    Widget *aWidget;
    aList = [server widgetList];
    aWidget = [aList objectAt: 0];

NB: This example is fantastic for building distributed apps. BUT accessing objects made a local proxy copy of the object. So you wouldn't want to run your world weather model through it - it would copy gigabytes of data over the network.

Also, as you can probably imagine it was horribly insecure, with no encryption. It was the late 80's, early 90's.