THE WHOLE PRODUCT Act III · NeXT · 1988–1990
  1. 1 · Apple II
  2. 2 · Lisa/Mac
  3. 3 · NeXT
  4. 4 · iMac/Cube
  5. 5 · iPod

Intermission: Away from Apple · 1988–1990

NeXT Computer

NeXT was not an Apple product. Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple entirely — this act is an intermission in the museum's story, not a change of company.

Central question

What happens when purity matters more than the market?

NeXTcube computer, a matte black magnesium cube, on museum display
NeXTcube, Musée Bolo, EPFL Lausanne. Photo: Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons.
Exhibit D · NeXT Computer & NeXTcube · 1988 / 1990

NeXT Computer / NeXTcube

The promise. Freed from Apple's shareholders, Jobs set out to build a computer with no compromises: an elegant object running a genuinely advanced operating system, aimed first at universities and researchers rather than a mass market.

The object. The distinctive one-foot magnesium cube case (NeXTcube, 1990) was designed with Hartmut Esslinger's frog design studio. Its real achievement was underneath: NeXTSTEP, an advanced object-oriented operating system built by a NeXT engineering team that included Avie Tevanian, running on a Mach kernel with a development environment years ahead of its contemporaries.

The outcome. A commercial failure as a hardware company — the machines were expensive and the market NeXT had chosen was small — and NeXT stopped making its own hardware in 1993 to focus on software alone.

What remained. More than the sales figures suggest. Tim Berners-Lee built the first web server on a NeXTcube in 1990. And in 1997, Apple bought NeXT — bringing Jobs back to the company he'd been forced out of, and bringing NeXTSTEP with him as the foundation of what became Mac OS X.

Technical record
NeXT Computer released
1988
NeXTcube released
1990
Design
Hartmut Esslinger / frog design (case); Avie Tevanian and the NeXT engineering team (NeXTSTEP, Mach kernel)
Operating system
NeXTSTEP — later the basis of Mac OS X, from 2001
Notable use
First web server, built by Tim Berners-Lee, 1990

NeXT's answer to "purity over market" was an operating system so good that Apple eventually bought the company to get it — and got its founder back in the deal. What Jobs did next, back at Apple, was choose the opposite emphasis: not purity for its own sake, but a single, unmistakable object that a store full of shoppers would actually want to take home.