NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc., and finally NeXT Software, Inc.) was the company Steve Jobs started after his departure from Apple in 1985. Jobs filed the incorporation papers in September 1985, the same period in which he formally left the company he had co-founded. NeXT set out to build high-end workstations aimed first at higher education and scientific research, and later at business, with the goal of delivering a far more advanced software platform than what was then available on personal computers.
The hardware was striking. The original NeXT Computer of 1988 was a black magnesium cube, followed in 1990 by the NeXTcube and the smaller, cheaper NeXTstation. But the machines were expensive and sold in modest numbers. The Computer History Museum’s history of the platform captures the paradox plainly: although “the hardware proved too expensive,” the NeXTSTEP operating environment “became innovative and productive,” and it was this software, not the cubes, that proved to be NeXT’s lasting contribution.
NeXTSTEP’s object-oriented frameworks, written in Brad Cox’s Objective-C, let developers assemble applications from reusable components and design interfaces visually with Interface Builder. The platform attracted a devoted developer base; famously, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and web server on a NeXT machine at CERN. NeXT eventually shifted its emphasis from hardware to software, ending its own workstation production and concentrating on NeXTSTEP and the portable OpenStep specification developed with Sun Microsystems.
The company’s defining moment came at the end of 1996, when Apple, struggling to modernize its aging Mac operating system, acquired NeXT for roughly 400 million dollars. The deal brought NeXTSTEP’s technology into Apple and, just as importantly, brought Steve Jobs back. NeXTSTEP’s Foundation and Application Kit frameworks were rebranded as Cocoa and became the foundation of Mac OS X.
That inheritance still runs through Apple’s software today. The “NS” prefix on Foundation and AppKit classes stands for NeXTSTEP, and the same object frameworks, by way of Cocoa Touch and UIKit, underpin every iPhone app. Few short-lived companies have left so durable a technical legacy: NeXT is often described as the most consequential commercial failure in computing history, because what it built outlived it by decades inside Apple’s products.