NeXT

NeXT Inc. was an American computer company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he was ousted from Apple.

The company produced a series of workstations aimed at the higher education and business markets; they ran NeXTSTEP, an advanced, UNIX-based, object-oriented operating system. Although their technology was very innovative for the time, high prices and little software available led to very poor sales.

NeXT machines were used to develop CERN's WorldWideWeb (the first web browser), and id Software's hit games Doom, Doom II, and Quake.

Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million in 1997, with the goal of using their operating system as the basis of a "modern Mac OS" after the Copland project failed to do so.

OpenSTEP, the Open Source descendent of NeXTSTEP, was then combined with components from FreeBSD to create first the Rhapsody environment, and then the Darwin / Aqua / Cocoa architecture first used in Mac OS X Server, and later Mac OS X Client.