NeXT

The NeXTSTEP OS is one that even I never used. It came up in conversation with Jason Hiner who had used it while a student at IU. NeXTSTEP has a important place in history that can’t be overlooked.

Today, Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. You can’t really think of one without the other. It wasn’t always that way though. In 1985, in grand Greek Tragedy form, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple by John Sculley, the executive that Jobs himself brought in from Pepsi to save Apple from financial disaster. When Jobs left Apple, he went on to form the NeXT Computer Company.

NeXT’s initial goal was to create powerful workstations for education and business. The NeXT workstation’s major innovation at the time was its 256Mb WORM drive that it used for removable storage rather than a traditional floppy drive. The NeXT came with the entire works of Shakespeare on a single CD-ROM which was one of the ‘cool factors’ about the box when it was introduced. The NeXT workstation also continued Job’s history of thinking different when it came to design, because the NeXT workstation was a simple Borg-like cube.

At the heart of the NeXT workstation was the NeXTSTEP OS. This OS was based on the Mach Unix kernel. It was originally developed for NeXT’s PowerPC CPU, but Jobs also created a version of it that ran on the Intel 486 CPU called NeXTSTEP 486. Here’s a screenshot of NeXTSTEP from Wikipedia:

NeXTSTEP is significant because when Jobs finally retook his rightful place as the head of Apple in 1996, he did so by arranging Apple to buy NeXT. In doing so, the NeXTSTEP OS came along as part of the package and ultimately became Mac OS X.