History of NeXT

If you watched my previous video on How Apple and Microsoft Became Rivals, You probably remember that Steve Jobs was fired by Apple’s former CEO John Sculley and board of directors in 1985. And that is where our story begins. Steve told the board he was going to start a new computer company consisting of himself and seven handpicked employees from SuperMicro, the division Steve lead inside Apple responsible for the Macintosh and Lisa systems. While still leading SuperMicro, Steve received a pitch from Paul Berg, a biochemistry professor at Stanford University. Berg wanted a 3M workstation for higher education use with a megabyte of RAM, a megaFLOP of performance, and a display with a resolution of 1200 by 900, or one megapixel. One megabyte of RAM, a megaFLOP chip, and a megapixel display, hence the name 3M. But due to internal turmoil between Steve and the board, he felt it wasn’t smart to ask for tons of money in R&D and marketing to develop this machine. However, when you have your own company, you don’t need approval from anyone to develop a product. So Jobs decided that the 3M computer was going to be NeXT’s first product.

[TheSteveSteele]

Great video. Just a couple more points. If Apple with Jobs would have built and released the NeXT computer as Apple’s next Mac in 1989 or slightly earlier, and found a way to absorb that cost to reasonable price points ($1000 units for consumer, education and business, to $3000 and $6000 units for workstation customers), I believe there’s a chance Microsoft doesn’t survive to make Windows NT or maybe Windows ‘95. That’s how advanced NeXTStep was and still is. It was OS X in the late ‘80s. Even today nobody makes a UNIX OS with a hybrid micro kernel, that has a postscript or PDF windowing kernel. Those two genius features of NeXTStep are what allowed it to port to multiple CPU architectures so easily as to be worth it, (68000, Power, Intel, ARM, SPARC, etc), and allowed it to scale the GUI from an iPod to iPhone iOS, Watch OS, TV OS, etc etc. NeXT could already do this back then because of the choices they made. And even after 30 years, because of its kernel design it can continue to morph to meet the demands of our time. Unless something supplants UNIX (doubtful anytime soon), macOS could go on for a very long time and remain the best OS on the planet. Btw, I had a BeBox running BeOS on two 603 PowerPCs and it wasn’t a sketchy OS. It had serious potential. Only thing odd about it is that is was so young there were no apps for it. Was it built with the knowledge Apple would need it someday? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it sketchy. It makes Jobs a much better pitch man than Gassée.

[StevenEveral]

In short: If there was no NeXT, there is no Pixar, there is no World Wide Web (at least as it's known now), no OS X, no iMac, basically no second coming of Apple in the late 90s.

[theharbingerofconflation]

That Logo is still jucy as hell, even 20 years later.

[WarriorsPhoto]

I remember reading about this company several years ago. It was impressive to see how Jobs built this company as opposed to how Apple’s corporate structure was built.
Good on Steve for taking care of his people. (:

[dontworryabit]

Steve pulled a “Michael scott paper company”

[HowieIsaacks]

It's a shame NeXT wasn't successful, but without it, there would be no macOS, iOS, watchOS, or tvOS. While working at an AT&T Wireless call center in the late 90s, I worked with a variant of the NeXT OS called OpenStep. When Mac OS X was released as a beta in Sept. 2000, I was already familiar with it due to my use of OpenStep.

[TheSteveSteele]

Apple is NeXT. The Apple prior to 1996 is gone. Seriously.

[lionflame]

If Apple and NeXT did not merge, Apple could have been gone now while NeXT's OS may have been running on most desktop computers instead of Windows.

[MarbsMusic]

I still have a NeXT workstation... complete matching system, it's simply a work of art!

[DominicGo]

That's why some parts of the Classes/Frameworks in macOS/iOS is prefixed with NS for NextSTEP. Most of these however are deprecated but is still part of AppKit and Cocoa up to this day: NSWindow, NSCursor, NSObject, NSArray etc.

So much of the core foundations of macOS (and iOS) were borrowed from NeXTSTEP: The unix foundation, Interface Builder, the .app extension (bundles), screen grabber, WYSIWYG etc.

The reason why macOS lasted for so long is because of the solid foundation of NeXTSTEP. It really was ahead of it's time ( I think steve jobs said in a keynote that it would last for the next decade)

The first website was even hosted/created on Next by a guy at CERN and DOOM was also created on next (And I think pixar also used it in the early days or maybe those were SGI computers idk)

[twistentiger]

1MB of RAM and my PC is Maxing 64GB of RAM with intention to expand.
We sure came from a long way

[lasseigne]

Even though this was the “third place winner” of the votes, I really like learning more about NeXT, I used to play with the software years ago!

[karmaduq]

OpenStep doesn't run on "Windows systems", I think you're thinking of the term "wintel", and you probably mean x86. Also, BeOS isn't a "sketchy Mac OS knock-off", it's a proprietary UNIX-like OS built ground-up for media performance, and it screamed on hundred-something MHz Pentiums back in the day. If anything, *Windows* was a Mac OS knock-off. I can has accuracy kthx.

[TheEpicDiamondMiner]

5:38 It sounds like if NeXT made the GameCube and the PlayStation

[Mister...H]

Missed the biggest part about NeXT the web browser and Web server was built on NeXTSTEP platform

[DavidRavenMoon]

There was absolutely nothing “sketchy” about BeOS. Have you ever used it? There was a lot to like about it. I ran it on my PoweeComputing Mac clone. A lot of us thought it would have made a great basis for Mac OS. But NeXTSTEP was a better choice.

Another very large company that ran WebObjects was the US Postal Service. Wish they still were.

[samrajagarwal]

252 views
56 likes
1 dislike (I bet that person would be John Scully)

[SuperGreatSphinx]

NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business use.

The company was founded by Apple Computer co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs after he was forcibly removed from Apple in 1985.

NeXT introduced its first product, the NeXT Computer, in 1988, followed by the smaller NeXTcube and NeXTstation in 1990.

These computers had relatively limited sales, with only about 50, 000 units shipped in total.

Nevertheless, their object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces were trendsetters of computer innovation, and highly influential.

[josecarlosxyz]

very few people
could be kicked from his own company
and after, found a new one successfully
sell that company to the previous
get back as CEO

[puckettonline]

Your channel is going to get huge. Thanks for the amazing videos.