Sounds like it might have been a demo of DBKit or EOF (NeXT's ORMs).

I remember watching Steve demo EOF at a tradeshow in Chicago, probably around 1995. His demo system crashed hard in the middle of the presentation, and we got to watch it reboot NEXTSTEP on the big screen. He handled it well, with an "oops" and a laugh, but I bet some people got their asses handed to them afterwards.

Last year I watched a demo in San Jose where the company started re-writing the code, in front of the audience, during the demo.

I felt terrible for them; it would've looked a lot better if they just fell back on something else. It was boring watching them write code, people were getting up and leaving, it made it look like they were wildly unprepared. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire company went kaput after that.

I'm surprised a demo visibly failed. Steve almost always had a hidden backup computer and an engineer following along with the preplanned demo in lockstep. If the machine crashed, a switch could be through and the demo could continue on the new machine.

It was DBKit, the precursor to EOF. DBKit started life as a sales demo to show that the NeXT was useful enough to connect to a real corporate database. The demo was so popular that the field asked it to be integrated into Application Builder, except that there wasn't an actual framework or design behind it. So we needed to come up with something.

DBKit was later rewritten with a real architecture which became Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF).

Probably EOF/EOModeller. He was later the CEO of a startup I worked at, the founders were both EOFy people.