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Relevant notes:

“Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million. Apple’s board of directors decided NeXTSTEP was a better choice and purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million, bringing back Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

“The programming language Objective-C was originally developed in the early 1980s. It was selected as the main language used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system, from which OS X and iOS are derived.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

“Despite NeXT’s limited commercial success, the company had a wide-ranging impact on the computer industry.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT

Basically, Apple bet the farm on an obscure language that emerged from a failed operating system, because they couldn’t afford to buy BeOS (a better OS) because Apple was broke. If you remember, Apple was not commercially successful for many years, until the iPod, but by then Apple developers were stuck with the unpopular Objective-C language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

(How Google Chrome resulted in Node.js) “The V8 JavaScript Engine is an open source JavaScript engine developed by The Chromium Project for the Google Chrome web browser. It has since seen use in many other projects, such as Couchbase, MongoDB and Node.js” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)

1997 (Three years after I recommended IBM drop Opendoc in favor of Java.) “Mr. Gee, a 29-year-old native of London, is the I.B.M. executive in charge of promoting Java, the new programming language on which so many in the computer industry are placing their hopes. He is helping to lead a campaign for the hearts and minds of software developers — a crusade that pits I.B.M., Sun Microsystems, Netscape Communications and others against Microsoft. ” http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/01/business/ibm-tries-to-outmaneuver-microsoft-by-supporting-java.html?pagewanted=all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

PS: I’m talking through Bluetooth, which explains the lisp ;-)