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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 computer 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,• although Apple made significant updates to incorporate modern features from BSD variants, in particular NetBSD and FreeBSD.
NeXT
Early history
Hardware
Software
Acquisition
Further reading
| | Company Name | NeXT | | Company Type | Private company | | Foundation | California, United States (1985) | | Location | Redwood City, California | | Key People | Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO
Ross Perot,... | | Industry | Computer hardware
Computer software | | Products | NeXTcube
NeXTstation
NeXTdimension<... | | Num Employees | 240 (1993) |
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Early history
In 1985, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs began to regret his hiring of John Sculley as the new CEO, and started a brief power struggle to regain control of the company. The board of directors sided with 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 computer industry. He developed a concept for an object-oriented toolkit, a set of basic building units for a graphical user interface, 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. using a personal 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 began work with the Adobe software company on what would eventually become Display PostScript. Jobs recruited graphic designer Paul Rand in 1986 to design NeXT's cube logo for US$100,000.•• The first major outside investment was from Ross Perot, who originally saw NeXT employees 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.•
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Hardware
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Soon after NeXT, Inc. was formed, Apple sued the company over contracts with key Apple employees that Jobs had brought to NeXT. In January 1986, an out of court settlement was made between the two parties. By mid-1986, it was clear that no existing operating system (OS) was capable of hosting a 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 need to 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.
NeXT's first hardware product was the NeXTcube, designed by frogdesign•
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.
The first issue of NeXTWORLD magazine debuted in 1991, discussing the NeXT computers, operating system and 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 at the San Francisco Civic Center and in 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.
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Software
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In 1992, NeXT sold 20,000 computers, a small amount compared to their competitors. NeXT reported annual sales of US$140 million, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat.• 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.
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 National Reconnaissance Office, Central Intelligence Agency, First Chicago NBD, Swiss Bank Corporation, and other organizations due to its programming model.
NeXT partnered with Sun Microsystems to create OpenStep, which was NeXTSTEP without the Mach-based Unix kernel. When it was founded, 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. 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 several online stores, such as Apple's iTunes Store.
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Acquisition
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 interim CEO. He brought with him most of the NeXT executives, who replaced their Apple counterparts. Over the next four years, the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the 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. Apple's Intel transition was completed in August 2006.
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Further reading
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