NeXT computers gave a user the best of both
worlds, a nice GUI (graphical user interface) and a UNIX environment to do power
tasks. I have a NeXT Cube (Motorola 68040, 33MHz) with NeXTdimension video
capability. The NeXTdimension board allows me to perform video I/O with a
television or VCR, which I really don't need for my engineering work, but is fun
to play around with.
TRIVIA NOTE:
The world's first web server was a NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
NeXT hardware is no longer manufactured, but the NeXT operating system
(NeXTstep) and third party applications are still being developed for a variety
of CPU architectures.
For more information on NeXT products, see the NeXT entry at
Wikepedia.
I do most of my engineering work using self written code in a variety of languages including:
FORTRAN - the old standby for scientific computing, still the best for intensive number crunching, like my work in computational fluid dynamics.
Objective C - good for system programming and application creation
perl - a very powerful scripting language, used for a large portion of the WWW programming tasks (search engines, processing forms), best of all it is available for a variety of platforms and is absolutely free! Perl fills a niche between UNIX shell scripts and full C code. It is a great system administration tool.