Steve Jobs is synonymous with Apple, as one of the tech giant’s visionary co-founders. However, during his hiatus from the company in the 1980s, Jobs also founded an equally ambitious electronics company, NeXT.
Jobs created NeXT in September 1985, the month he left the burgeoning Silicon Valley powerhouse. The months preceding this event saw a now infamous internal power struggle at the company between Jobs and Apple CEO John Sculley, eventually culminating in the former being sacked.
NeXT was the new play for Jobs, and he assembled somewhat of a dream team when embarking on the venture, including several senior figures from Apple.
This included Rich Page, one of the first four Apple Fellows, as well as Bud Tribble, head of the company’s software development segment, George Crow, Susan Barnes, head of the Macintosh division, and Dan’l Lewin, a prominent figure in the Apple sales division.
As one might expect, NeXT primarily focused on positioning itself as a key up-and-coming player in the computer hardware industry - and it definitely shook things up.
Indeed, the NeXTSTEP operating system developed by the company paved the wave for the iconic MacOS operating system we know today, originally powering the NeXT Computer.
This was the company’s flagship product: a workstation marketed for use among students and academic organizations.
Launched in 1988, it came in at a whopping $6,500, equivalent to around $17, 700 in 2025 dollars - however Byte magazine notably described the workstation as being “worth every penny” and acknowledged it at its annual awards in 1989.
Under the hood of the NeXT Computer
As mentioned, the NeXT Computer ran on the NeXTSTEP operating system, which was based on Unix. The device was informally referred to as ‘The Cube’ due to its bulky, cube-like appearance.
The workstation came with a MegaPixel 17-inch monitor, complete with built-in speakers. Under the hood, the device was powered by a 68030 CPU, developed by Motorola and released the year prior to the device’s launch.
A notable aspect of the NeXT Computer was that it also boasted a Motorola 68882 Floating-Point Unit (FPU), designed specifically to support high-speed mathematical performance.
This inaugural release was followed by the NeXTcube and NeXTstation, both of which were launched in September 1990.
Back to the beginning
In December 1996, Apple acquired NeXT in a deal worth $427 million, once again bringing Jobs back into the fold at the tech giant. While NeXT devices themselves didn’t exactly blow away competition, the impact of the NeXTSTEP operating system cannot be understated.
A key factor behind the Apple acquisition lay in the appeal of the OS, which in the aftermath formed the basis of Mac OS X, later rebranded to MacOS.
That isn’t to say the workstation didn’t play a role in the broader development of the early web, however. Notably, Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first web server using a NeXT computer during his time at CERN.
Iconic video games such as Quake and Doom were also brought to life using the NeXT Computer - as game studio id Software was a big customer, having spent around $100,000 to equip developers.
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