The story of OpenSesame, and the one Steve Jobs photo I really hope to find.

Back in the day at NeXT, everybody was encouraged to work on little side projects. Even us field engineer folks would hack up different things in Objective-C with Interface Builder to try to impress each other. One that I whipped up, called Open Sesame, eventually shipped in NeXTSTEP. Here’s the icon. And I hope some day I can find a photo of Steve Jobs with Open Sesame’s icon on the screen. I think he would have used it occasionally. Amazingly, although the app is long gone, the Open Sesame icon is still shipping from Apple today. And the junior engineer who helped me ship this app turned out to be somewhat famous. wait, Open Sesame, what was it? OK, let me back up a bit. Here’s the situation I was trying to simplify. (You have my permission to skip this part.) NeXT computers ran the NeXTSTEP operating system, on Motorola 68030 and 68040 chips, on NeXT’s own NeXTCube and NeXTStation computers. Eventually, NeXTSTEP was ported to run on Intel processors too, and NeXT quit making its…