Almost all of us know that Apple is the largest company in the world and the person responsible for one of the most desired technological products on the planet, the iPhone. The achievements of this firm are, without a doubt, impressive, but what many do not know is that part of its essence originates from NeXTa much smaller company founded in the late 1980s by Steve Jobs.

The origin of NeXT was the product of a series of events, perhaps unexpected, that shook Jobs. By 1980, Apple had grown from a company operating out of a garage in Los Altos, California, to a true technology which was experiencing spectacular average annual growth of 533%. At that time, Apple began searching for a new CEO.

A big change at Apple

At that time, Mike Markkula, who had been the company’s first major investor, He no longer liked the idea of ​​being the president of Apple. Jobs, despite his strong temperament, I knew I wasn’t ready. to assume the position, so both began looking for a replacement outside the company’s orbit. They needed someone who could drive product sales, not someone technological.

Thus, Jobs and Markkula turned to Gerry Roche, a well-known corporate headhunter. Roche was quick to recommend John Sculley. He was the president of PepsiCo and the person responsible for the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign that had resulted in a real advertising success to confront its staunchest rival, Coca-Cola. However, after a series of meetings, Sculley was still not convinced to leave his company to join Apple.

It had reached a point where Sculley was convinced he could offer Jobs advice on how to run the company from an outside place, as a friend. Steve, however, was used to getting what he wanted and played one last card to try to persuade him. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water Or do you want an opportunity to change the world?” he told him. With that move he had no choice but to accept the proposal.

The fall of the company

At first, the relationship between Jobs and Sculley seemed to be going great, but as time went by, tension and disagreements began to grow between them. In the mid-1980s, the former Pepsi executive was unhappy with Jobs’ leadership and, with the support of the company’s board of directors, set up a plan to sideline the person who had co-founded Apple less than a decade ago.

A short time ago, during a meeting in Palo Alto organized by the president of Stanford University, Jobs had had a talk with the Nobel Prize winner in Biochemistry, Paul Berg. The scientist told him about advances in the field of genetics and recombinant DNA. Jobs had asked him why he didn’t do the computer simulations and Berg had told him that the type of machines needed For that job they were too expensive.

OK ‘Steve Jobs’, the authorized biography written by Walter Isaacsonthe young and intrepid entrepreneur remembered that conversation. He had previously attempted to build a computer so powerful that it would be considered a workstation and would carry the name Big Mac, but the project had fizzled out along with his loss of power within Apple and the loss of the title of head of the Macintosh group. This is how Jobs considered the idea of ​​founding a new computer company.

The birth of NeXT

Wasting no time, in September 1985, Jobs told Apple’s board of directors that he would found his own company, NeXT, and that he would take some employees with him. Likewise, he promised them that the products of his new project would not interfere with the plans of the apple company. That is, they would sell workstations designed for the educational field and not for consumers in general.

These movements did not come for free. Shortly after, Jobs resigned from Apple, a company that had taken away the power he once had. And, if that were not enough, the apple company sued the newborn NeXT for “nefarious schemes” to take advantage of the co-founders’ privileged information. “It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with more than 4,300 people couldn’t compete with six people in jeans,” Jobs expressed in response to the lawsuit which ended up being resolved later.

Jobs had invested $12 million of his own money to found NeXT. He was tremendously convinced of the project, so convinced that he implemented a different philosophy than Apple’s. There were only two salaries: all those who had joined the company before 1986 received $75,000 per year and all those who joined after received $50,000 per year. So, some employees received more money than some managers. And, in reality, there were no employees, but “members” of the team.

The first product of Jobs’ new company was the NeXT Computera workstation presented in 1988. It had a Motorola 68030 CPU capable of reaching a speed of 25 MHz and was offered as standard with 8 MB of RAM, although there was the possibility of expanding this element up to 64 MB, which in those years It was brutality. At the storage level, it had a 256 MB magneto-optical drive and a 330 MB or 660 MB disk drive could optionally be purchased.

Curiously, it did not have a color screen. The monitor, NeXT MegaPixel Display, was a 17-inch monochrome CRT panel. The most valuable thing about the computer was its system. This mounted an OS called NeXTSTEP that had multitasking capabilities and was based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. Something striking was its price: $6,500., about 16,300 current dollarsan expense that only large entities could account for.

Sales were rather modest, so in 1989, Jobs reached an agreement with Businessland, which until then had been a Compaq distributor, to sell NeXT computers in international markets. In 1990 the second generation of workstations arrived. One was called NeXT Cube and the other NeXT Station. These computers introduced improvements such as a color screen, processors that exceeded 30 MHz, CD-ROM drives and the possibility of expanding RAM memory up to 128 MB.

Change in the business model and purchase by Apple

Despite NeXT’s efforts to increase sales, they were still below expectations. In an unexpected move, Jobs decided to move away from the hardware business and focus exclusively on software, even allowing other manufacturers to install the advanced NeXTSTEP operating system. One of them, precisely, was Canon, which invested 100 million dollars in the company with the condition of installing the OS on its own workstations.

In this move, NeXT Computer was renamed NeXT Software and laid off more than half of its workforce. The company focused on developing the OpenStep Enterprise object-oriented API and the WebObjects application server. While the former offered an environment similar to the NeXTSTEP OS for other systems, including Windows, the latter allowed web applications to run on all types of computers.

As Isaacson points out, Apple was not going through its best moment and Jobs still hoped to return to the company he co-founded, but in a dignified way. While on vacation in Hawaii, his friend and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison approached him with the idea of ​​helping him put together $3 billion in financing to buy Apple. “I will buy Apple, you will get 25% of the company immediately by becoming its CEO, and we will be able to return it to its glory of times past,” he told him to try to convince him.

Jobs, however, decided to let that offer pass, claiming that he was not the kind of person who would present a hostile takeover — a move that, remember, Yes, Elon Musk was willing to do to buy Twitter—. Apple’s market share had fallen to 4% from the 16% it enjoyed in the late 1980s, and Gil Amelio, a research engineer at the company, had become its CEO.

Apple had a big problem with the operating system of its computers: had aged rapidly. Given this scenario, the company began to consider several options. An ongoing project called Copland (BeOS), although advanced, seemed not to be the solution to what the Cupertino company was looking for, since it would not be ready for the launch of its next generation of products. I urgently needed an OS with memory protection, network communications, and an object-oriented application layer.

The company considered using Sun’s Solaris operating system and even Microsoft’s Windows NT. Bill Gates had been enthusiastic about the idea and began to personally negotiate with Amelio as Microsoft’s own co-founder suggested in an All Things Digital interview in 2007. The best possibility was to reach an agreement with NeXT to use their operating system, but Amelio had argued with Steve some time ago and did not have the courage to call him.

Despite the bad outcome of the past, Apple was beginning to receive signals that NeXT would be willing to reach an agreement. Negotiations began with middle management and progressed until Jobs returned to Cupertino after eleven years. Finally, Apple bought NeXT in 1997 for $429 million and 1.5 million shares in a deal that saw part of NeXT’s operating system be used to develop a new version of Mac OS called Mac OS X.

As part of the deal, Jobs returned to Apple. First as an external consultant, then as interim CEO and, in 2000, as permanent CEO. He remained in this position until his resignation on August 24, 2011.time before his death on October 5 of that same year. During this time, Jobs promoted some of the most dramatic changes in the company, such as reordering its product line and betting on the development of the new version of the OS.

NeXT, in some ways, could be considered a failure. In total he sold 50,000 workstations, but his essence, including his talent, were the elements that helped save Apple. NeXTSTEP technology became the core of Mac OSeven some elements of the graphical interface were also born in this OS, such as the Dock, the services menu and the “Column” view of the Finder.

But before all this, when NeXT had not yet been purchased by Apple, Tim Berners-Lee, known as “the father of the World Wide Web”, used a NeXT workstation to develop the first web browser and server. id Software used these machines to develop the iconic ‘Doom’ video game series. Many machines also became CIA and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) workstations.

Images | Wikimedia Commons | Paul Rand (NeXT) | Bernard Gotfryd Marcin Wichary

*An earlier version of this article was published in December 2022

*Due to a technical error, the author of this article appears as Andrés P. Mohorte. Actually its author is Javier Márquez