In 1985 Steve Jobs was forced from Apple after a brief power struggle with John Sculley, which led to his banishment to the back of a distant building on the Apple campus. After a few months of this, he left. After "bumbing around" for a while he decided that computers really were his strong suit, and started visiting various universities to look at where the industry was going.

It was on these trips that several concepts and key people were discovered. They included:

PostScript appeared to be on its way to becoming the standard graphics language
Mach at Carnegie Mellon University seemed to be re-writing the whole idea of the operating system, and there he met...
Avie Tevanian, one of the primary authors of Mach
object oriented programming was a hot topic at all campuses

Later that year he collected these ideas into a product concept that he thought would be the next big thing: an object oriented toolkit, aimed primarily at the academic market, using PostScript as its display technology. Starting NeXT Inc. with an out-of-pocket investment of $7 million, he hired seven employees (mostly ex-Apple folk from the Macintosh project) and starts work with Adobe on on what would eventually become Display PostScript.

NeXT Computer

By the middle of 1986 it was clear that no existing operating system was capable of hosting the toolkit, at least not at a personal computer level. Instead of making and selling a toolkit, the business plan changed to making and selling machines running the toolkit over a Mach-based OS created by a team led by Avie Tevanian, who had joined the company. The name of the company was changed to NeXT Computer Inc..

By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube. Prototype cubes are shown to standing ovations in late 1988, and beta versions are shipped in 1989. The operating system is finally ready for general release in 1990, and the cube goes on the market.

At the time Jobs was concerned that the market was quickly stratifying and the window of opportunity for any new platform was rapidly closing. Just after their release he noted that "this will either be the last machine to make it, or the first not to".

Most of the industry press focussed on the hardware. The cube was visually striking and had a number of design features that were considered "way out". For instance, the cube had no hard drive or floppies, replacing both a new 256MB Magneto-optical device. The machine was based on the Motorola 68030 which had recently come to market, making it compete with the workstation vendors like Sun in terms of performance, although for somewhat lower cost. It also included the 56661 DSP for multi-media work, Ethernet, and a large greyscale "megapixel display. All of these were very advanced features for the era.

When it was discovered that the MO drive led to very serious performance problems in real-world use, NeXT as a whole gained a reputation for failure that would never rub off. The MO drive was considerably slower than a hard drive from the same era, and yet held more information while being smaller and much less expensive (the MO drive was one of the first on the market). A machine with a hard drive would have been much faster than the same one with the MO, yet it appears this was specifically ruled out by Jobs himself.

This problem was rectified by 1991, when a new series of machines with floppy disks and hard drives shipped. A new line then introduced the newer and much faster 68040. The same parts were also put in a new "pizza box" case, creating the NeXTstation, which sold at a lower price point and became fairly popular.

With all of the attention focused on the hardware, the true gem of the system, NeXTSTEP, was lost in the hype. Although the machines were never big sellers, those who had one, or even just used one, quickly learned the power of the NeXTSTEP system. Even today it is considered to be the hight point of computer development.

A number of programs started shipping for the system, including the amazing Lotus Improv spreadsheet, and the first web browser. The system also shipped with a number of "smaller" applications built in that would actually improve the enviornment considerably without being obvious, things like the Oxford Dictionary, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and a set of Pantone colors.

In all, some 50,000 NeXT machines were sold. This was a tiny segment of the market, and proved Steve's own words prophetic. It's worth pointing out that there hasn't been a single successful desktop platform since. Nevertheless it's 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.

NeXT Software

By 1992 work had already started on a port of 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 which was starting up as a joint program between Apple, IBM and Motorola.

By late 1993 the Intel port was complete, and was released in the form of NeXTSTEP 3.1 (also referred to as NEXTSTEP 486). Work on the PowerPC machines stopped along with all hardware production, and the company renamed once again, this time to NeXT Software Inc.

NeXTSTEP 3.x was later ported to PA-RISK and SPARC based platforms, for a total of four versions:

NEXTSTEP/NeXT for NeXT's "black boxes"
NEXTSTEP/Intel
NEXTSTEP/PA-RISC
NEXTSTEP/SPARC

The Intel version was popular for a time, but the PA-RISC and SPARC versions seem to have seen little use. At the same time NeXT and Sun started an effort that would lead to OpenStep, basically NeXTSTEP running on some other OS rather than Mach.

By this point the company had come full circle. Originally intending to sell a toolkit running on top of other OS's, they had ventured into hardware, failed, and returned to selling a toolkit running on top of other OS's. But no matter how successful the toolkit was, NeXT never managed to avoid the smell of failure - they were always the company who exited the computer market, never the company that conquered a programming market.

New products continued to ship on the platform, but Steve had clearly lost interest and was spending all of his time at Pixar.

End of NeXT

In 1996 Apple purchased the assets of NeXT Software in order to use OpenStep to replace the now outdated MacOS, but it would be a long four years before it would be released as Mac OS X.