NeXT was a computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured two computer workstations during its existence, the NeXTcube and NeXTstation. Both systems were aimed at the higher education and business markets. NeXT was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs after his resignation from Apple Computer. In addition to its hardware, NeXT developed the NeXTSTEP operating system, later sold for other processors as OPENSTEP, competing against Windows 95. In 1993, NeXT withdrew from its hardware business and on February 7, 1997 was bought out by Apple; NeXT's software was used as the foundation for Mac OS X.

Early history

In 1985, Steve Jobs began to regret his hiring of John Sculley as the CEO of Apple, and started a brief power struggle to regain control of the company. The board of directors stood behind Sculley, and Jobs was stripped of most of his duties. After a few months of being sidelined, he resigned.

A few months after his departure from Apple, Jobs visited universities to determine the future direction of the computing industry. He developed a concept for an object-oriented toolkit aimed primarily at the academic market. The toolkit would take advantage of the latest technologies: PostScript for display, the Mach kernel, and object-oriented programming.

Starting NeXT Inc. with an out-of-pocket investment of US$7 million, Jobs hired several employees, including Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, Susan Barnes and Dan’l Lewin, most of whom had served on the Macintosh team at Apple. NeXT first worked with Adobe on what would eventually become Display PostScript. Jobs recruited Paul Rand in 1986 to design NeXT's cube logo for US$100,000. The first major source of venture capital was Ross Perot, who originally saw NeXT and Jobs featured on The Entrepreneurs, a television show. He decided to invest US$20 million in 1987 for 16% of NeXT's stock, and joined the board of directors of NeXT in 1988.

NeXT Computer

Soon after NeXT, Inc. was formed, Apple sued the company over the contracts of key Apple employees that Jobs had brought to NeXT. In January 1986, an out of court settlement between the two parties restricted NeXT to the workstation market. By mid-1986, it was clear that no existing operating system (OS) was capable of hosting the toolkit, at least not on a personal computer level. This forced a change in the business plan: not only would NeXT create the toolkit, they would also build hardware and a Unix-like Mach-based OS for the toolkit to run on. The OS would be created by a team led by Avie Tevanian, one of the Mach engineers at Carnegie Mellon University who had since joined the company. The hardware division was led by Rich Page, an Apple veteran who had designed the Apple Lisa. The name of the company was changed to NeXT Computer Inc.

By 1987, construction of a factory for their first product, the NeXTcube, was completed in Fremont. Stories about Jobs' demands for the factory and the cube are now legend, including the repainting of the factory several times in order to get just the right shade of gray, and the institution of a series of time-consuming changes to the production line so that the cube's expensive magnesium case would have perfect right-angle edges. The NeXTcube was designed by frogdesign.

At that time, most computers shipped with hard drives of 20 or 40 MB. Floppy disks were used to load the OS and additional software. This was becoming a problem, as the user needed to swap many floppies to load the ever-growing number of applications. At the time, a 640 MB drive cost US$5000. In an attempt to solve this issue, the NeXTcube used a removable medium 256MB magneto-optical drive (MO) manufactured by Canon. These drives were relatively new to the market, and the NeXTcube was the first computer to use them.

The NeXTcube was based on the new 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU. There had been some discussion of using the Motorola 88000 RISC chip, but it was considered too risky as they weren't available in quantity at the time. The 68030 was supported by the 68882 FPU for faster mathematical performance, the 56001 digital signal processor (DSP) for multi-media work and two custom-designed 6-channel Direct memory access (DMA) channel controllers, which allowed much of the input/output (I/O) processing to be offloaded from the CPU to boost the speed of common tasks.

The NeXTcube was not as fast as the latest generation of Unix workstations becoming available at that time, but cost about half as much. The machine shipped with 8 MB of Random Access Memory (RAM) when 4 MB cost US$1500, a 256 MB MO drive, Ethernet, NuBus and a 17" MegaPixel grayscale display measuring 1120×832 pixels. Meanwhile the typical PC shipped with: 640 KB of RAM, the 8088, 8086 or 286 CPU, either a 320×200 4-color or 640×480 monochrome display, and typically no hard disk or networking capabilities.

Prototype cubes were shown to standing ovations in October 1988 PC Magazine, September 11, 1990, Volume 9, Number 15., and a slew of magazines reviewed the system - all concentrating on the hardware. By 1989, the machines were in testing, and NeXT started selling limited numbers to universities with a beta version of the OS installed. When asked if he was upset that the computer's debut was delayed by several months, Jobs responded, "Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!".

In February 1989, Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy was asked what he thought of the NeXTcube, replying "it's the wrong operating system, the wrong processor, and the wrong price". 'Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing'', by Randall Stross, 1993.

In 1989, Canon invested US$100 million into NeXT, a 16.67% stake. The machines weren't ready for "real" sales until 1990, when they went on the market for US$9,999. At the time Jobs was concerned that the market was quickly stratifying and the window of opportunity to introduce any new platform was rapidly closing. In June 1991, Ross Perot, NeXT's original investor, resigned from the board of directors.

The magneto optical drive was expensive and had performance problems despite being faster than a floppy drive. Disks cost about US$100 each, and the drive was not sufficient to run as the primary medium running the NeXTSTEP operating system. In 1991, NeXT released the NeXTstation in an attempt to solve these problems, by replacing the magneto optical drive with a floppy drive. The new computers were cheaper and used the newer and faster 68040 processor inside a new "pizza box" case.

Also in 1991, the first issue of NeXTWORLD magazine debuted, discussing the NeXT computers and operating system, and also reviewing software. It was published in San Francisco by Integrated Media, and edited by Simson Garfinkel. Publication was ceased in 1994, after 4 volumes had been released.

A NeXTWORLD Expo followed as a developer conference, held in 1992 and 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with Steve Jobs as the keynote speaker. Several developers used the NeXT platform for programs that would make them famous. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXTcube in 1991 to create the first web browser and web server, the beginning of the World Wide Web as it is known today. Also, in the early 1990s, John Carmack used a NeXTcube to build two of his pioneering games: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

A number of programs shipped for NeXT computers, including the Lotus Improv spreadsheet program, WorldWideWeb, the world's first web browser, and Mathematica. The systems also shipped with a number of smaller applications built in such as the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Oxford Quotations, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and the Digital Librarian search engine to access them all.

In all, some 50,000 NeXT machines were sold. This was a tiny segment of the market, and proved Jobs' own words prophetic. Although the lack of success by other new desktop platforms (such as the BeBox) suggests that the age of unique hardware designs was over, it is an open question as to whether the systems would have been more successful had they avoided the performance and price problems by including a hard drive in the first machines, and had found a more cost-effective RAM setup.

NeXT Software

In 1992, NeXT sold 20,000 computers, a small amount compared to their competitors. NeXT also reported annual sales of US$140 million, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat. Also in 1992, NeXT started porting the NeXTSTEP operating system to the Intel platform. At the same time work began on replacing the 68000 series CPU's with the new PowerPC, a joint processor platform created by Apple, IBM and Motorola.

In 1993, NeXT dropped their hardware business, laying off 300 employees of 540 total employees; they also negotiated to sell the hardware business including the Fremont factory to Canon. Canon later pulled out of the deal. By late 1993, the Intel port of NeXTSTEP was complete, and version 3.1, also known as NeXTSTEP 486, was released. Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production. Before its release, Chrysler planned to buy 3,000 copies of the NeXTSTEP 486 operating system in 1992. After dropping their hardware business, NeXT renamed to NeXT Software Inc.

Also in 1993, CEO of Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy announced plans to invest US$10 million in NeXT, and use its software in future Sun systems. Business Week, December 20, 1993.

NeXTSTEP 3.x was later ported to PA-RISC and SPARC based platforms, for a total of four versions including NeXTSTEP/NeXT (for NeXT's 68k "black boxes"), NeXTSTEP/Intel, NeXTSTEP/PA-RISC and NeXTSTEP/SPARC. Although these ports were not widely used, NeXTSTEP gained popularity at institutions such as the Central Intelligence Agency, First Chicago NBD, Swiss Bank Corporation, and other organizations due to its programming model.

NeXT came full circle when they partnered with Sun Microsystems to create OPENSTEP, which was NeXTSTEP without the Mach-based Unix kernel. NeXT originally intended to sell a toolkit running on top of other operating systems, but ventured into hardware instead. After dropping their hardware business, NeXT returned to selling a toolkit to run on other OSes. OPENSTEP never become commercially successful or popular, despite many developers using it for enterprise software.

New products based on OPENSTEP continued to ship, including OPENSTEP ENTERPRISE, a version that ran on Windows NT. The company also launched WebObjects, a platform for building large-scale dynamic web applications. This technology is still in use in a few online stores, such as Apple's iTunes Music Store.

End of NeXT

On December 20, 1996, Apple Computer announced its intention to purchase NeXT for $377.5 million in cash (returned to the initial investors) and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs. The main purpose of the acquisition was to use NeXTSTEP as a foundation to replace the outdated Mac OS. Apple preferred this move to either the pursuit of in-house Copland efforts or the purchase of BeOS.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant, and then became the acting CEO. He brought with him most of the NeXT executives, who replaced their Apple counterparts. Industry commentators summarized this by referring to the acquisition as "NeXT getting paid to buy Apple".

Over the next four years, the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the Apple Macintosh PowerPC architecture, and the Intel version and the OpenStep Enterprise toolkit for Windows were kept in sync. The operating systems were code-named Rhapsody, while the toolkit for development on all platforms was given the moniker Yellow Box. Apple added many of their facilities and tools to Rhapsody, including QuickTime and ColorSync. For backward compatibility, Apple added the Blue Box to the Mac version of Rhapsody; this allowed existing Mac applications to be run in a self-contained environment.

After two beta releases, Rhapsody for Intel disappeared and the PowerPC version became Mac OS X Server 1.0. Two years later, a consumer version was released as Mac OS X 10.0. The server version was brought into sync soon after. The OpenStep toolkit was renamed from Yellow Box to Cocoa. Rhapsody's Blue Box became "classic". At the insistence of existing Mac developers, Apple included an updated version of the original Macintosh toolbox that allowed existing Mac applications integrated access to the environment without the constraints of Blue Box; this was named Carbon. Many interface features from NeXTSTEP were carried over into Mac OS X, including the dock, the services menu, the finder's 'browser' view, the text system (NSText) and system-wide selectors for fonts and colors.

NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were wholly retained in Mac OS X. Every version was secretly compiled onto both the PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures, even though only PowerPC versions were released—except for Darwin, the open sourced foundation of Mac OS X, of which both versions were released. On June 6 2005, Apple publicly announced that, starting in 2006, Macs would be based on Intel CPUs instead of PowerPCs, returning the NeXT software back to the platform to which it was ported in 1993. On January 10 2006, Apple released an Intel-native version of Mac OS X, along with the Intel Core Duo-based iMac and MacBook Pro. On February 28, Apple announced that it was replacing the PowerPC based Mac Mini with one that runs on Intel Core Solo and Core Duo processors; on April 24, the 17" (43 cm) MacBook Pro was launched at the NAB conference, replacing the Powerbook. The consumer-oriented Macbook was introduced on May 16, 2006.

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