NeXT, Inc.

NeXT, Inc was an American computer company, based in Redwood City, California. NeXT was known for its high standard computers, created principally for the business markets and for educational purpose.

History

In 1984 Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was chief of the Macintosh and Lisa computer projects. One day discussing with Paul Berg, he suggested to create a "3M" workstation with more than one megabyte of RAM, a megapixel and a megaflop. After some discussion inside Apple, Jobs was forced to leave its company.

For this reason Jobs and other Apple's employees decided to create a new company, called Next, Inc.
Jobs and his few employees started asking and getting information about what education/scientific companies wanted to have from their workstations. At the end of the screening, the result was that they had to be as powerful to run without problems and crashes, and cheap enough so that students could buy them.

First and Second Generation Computers

In 1986 they decided to start developing their own software and hardware, instead of using components of other companies.

The team was joined by Avie Tevanian, that was working on the Mach kernel, a kernel program used for operating systems research. Tevanian's purpose was to create a new operating system, which later became NeXTSTEP.

NeXT first workstation was called NeXT Computer, also called "the cube".
Originally presented in 1987, during the "NeXT Introduction", the first machines were tested just in 1989, many months after their presentation.

Operating System

NeXTSTEP

NeXTSTEP is a the result Steve Jobs's work after he was kicked out from Apple. In 1988 NeXTSTEP preview was released and in 1988 was ready to be sold. NexTSTEP GUI was quite impressive. To implement their GUI they used Objective-C, which was an extension of C language. NeXTSTEP introduced the dock and the shelf, the widgets, color icons, drag and drop for files, scrolling, etc.
NeXTSTEP was also used to develop the "WWW" (World Wide Web) at CERN during 1990 .

Programming Language

Objective-C

Objective-C is a programming language that was created around 1981 by Brad Cox and Tom Love, with the purpose to add Smalltalk-80 functionality to C. This one, was limited to structures and global functions, Objective-C added Classes, Objects and Protocols.
In 1988 NeXT got the license to use Objective-C. At NeXT, Objective-C was used to create the user interface, the AppKit, Foundation Kit, and the interface builder. Thanks to the success of this products, they decided to focus just on softwares.