The iPhone in your pocket, the Mac on your desk, and even the watch on your wrist are all based on NeXTSTEP, an operating system developed by a long forgotten computer maker called NeXT.

Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985, just months after his humiliating departure from Apple. Jobs was determined to beat Apple at its own game by proving his new company was the next big thing in computing. But it didn’t work out that way. While NeXT’s iconic cube-shaped workstations gained a loyal following, they never sold in large numbers. 

Despite many setbacks and failures, Jobs’ wilderness years at NeXT laid the foundation for decades of success that would follow. Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in 1997 proved to be one of the greatest mergers in business history. During his second tenure at Apple, Jobs oversaw the migration of the Mac onto his NeXTSTEP platform. Many of its quirky features, like the spinning beachball of death, are still recognizable in MacOS to this day.

LINKS

The full story of how Steve Jobs learned about 3M computers on a trip to Brown University - “What’s a megaflop?”:
 https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html

The NeXT logo, designed by Paul Rand:
 https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand

Try NeXTSTEP out for yourself on Infinite Mac:
 https://infinitemac.org

The NeXT Computer Tim Berners-Lee used to develop the world’s first Web browser at the Science Museum in London:
 https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/world-wide-web-global-information-space

Check out these pics of NeXT’s HQ and *that* staircase:
 https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next/next_hq

NeXT cube Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr
 © Rama, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#/media/File:NEXT_Cube-IMG_7151.jpg

Thanks to our sound engineer, Martin Algesten, for making us sound fabulous.