NeXT

In 1985, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs led a division campaign called SuperMicro, which was responsible for developing the Macintosh and Lisa computers. They were commercial successes on university campuses because Jobs had personally visited a few notable universities to promote his products, and because of Apple University Consortium, a discounted academic marketing program. The Consortium had earned over $50 million from computer sales by February 1984.

Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand. Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.

Jobs was intrigued by Berg's concept of a workstation and contemplated starting a higher-education computer company in late 1985, amid increasing turmoil at Apple. Jobs's division did not release the upgraded versions of the Macintosh computer and much of the Macintosh Office software. As a result, its sales plummeted, and Apple was forced to write off millions of dollars in unsold inventory.

In 1985, John Sculley ousted Jobs from his executive role at Apple and replaced him with Jean-Louis Gassée. Later that year, Jobs began a power struggle to regain control over his company. The board of directors sided with Sculley, and Jobs took a business trip to Western Europe and the Soviet Union on behalf of Apple. In September 1985, after several months of being sidelined, Jobs resigned from Apple. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him, but he also promised that his new company would not compete with Apple and might even consider licensing their designs to them under the Macintosh brand.

NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs and several former Apple employees, including Joanna Hoffman, Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, Susan Barnes, Susan Kare, and Dan'l Lewin. After consulting with major educational buyers from around the country, including a follow-up meeting with Paul Berg, a tentative specification for a workstation computer was drawn up. …

Steve Jobs created a unique corporate culture at NeXT in terms of facilities, salaries, and benefits. Jobs had experimented with some structural changes at Apple, but at NeXT he abandoned conventional corporate structures, instead making a "community" with "members" instead of employees. There were only two different salaries at NeXT until the early 1990s. Team members who joined before 1986 were paid $75,000 (equivalent to $220,000 in 2025) and those who joined afterward were paid $50,000 (equivalent to $147,000 in 2025). This caused a few awkward situations where managers were paid less than their employees. Later, employees were given performance reviews and raises every six months. To foster openness, all employees had full access to the payrolls, although few employees ever used the privilege. NeXT's health insurance plan offered benefits to not only married couples but unmarried and same-sex couples, although the latter privilege was later withdrawn due to insurance complications. The payroll schedule was also very different from other Silicon Valley companies at the time, because instead of employees being paid twice per month at the end of the pay period, they were paid once per month in advance.

Jobs found office space in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, California, at 3475 Deer Creek Road, occupying a glass-and-concrete building that featured a staircase designed by the architect I. M. Pei. The interior was gutted and elegantly redone with an open floor featuring hardwood flooring, custom furniture and Ansel Adams prints. The only enclosed rooms were Jobs's office and a few conference rooms.

To avoid inventory errors, NeXT used the just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategy. The company contracted out for all major components, such as mainboards and cases, and had the finished components shipped to the first floor of the Palo Alto office where they were assembled.

NeXT's expansion prompted the company to move to 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive, in Redwood City, also designed by Pei. The architectural centerpiece was a "floating" staircase with no visible supports.

NeXT's Palo Alto office was subsequently occupied by Internet Shopping Network (a subsidiary of Home Shopping Network) in 1994, and later by SAP AG. …

Though not very profitable, the company had a wide-ranging impact on the computer industry. Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system.

Widely seen as a response to NeXT, Microsoft announced the Cairo project in 1991; the Cairo specification included similar object-oriented user-interface features for a proposed consumer version of Windows NT. Although Cairo was ultimately abandoned, some elements were integrated into other projects.

By 1993, Taligent was considered by the press to be a competitor in objects and operating systems, even without any product release, and with NeXT as a main point of comparison. For the first few years, Taligent's theoretical innovation was often compared to NeXT's older but mature and commercially established platform, but Taligent's launch in 1995 was called "too little, too late", especially when compared with NeXT.

Several developers used the NeXT platform to write pioneering programs. For example, in 1990, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer to develop the world's first web server (CERN httpd) and the first web browser and editor (WorldWideWeb). The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers. Other commercial programs were released for NeXT computers, including Altsys Virtuoso—a vector-drawing program with page-layout features, which was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Aldus FreeHand v4—and the Lotus Improv spreadsheet program.

The open-source GNUstep widget toolkit, window manager and desktop can be considered as open-source implementations of NeXTSTEP's object model and user interface.