NeXT

When Steve Jobs resigned from his position at Apple in 1985, he founded a company called NeXT. Together with his colleagues he revisited an old idea and started work on a powerful graphics workstation. It was meant to be used, for example, in simulating chemical reactions and displaying the results on a high resolution monitor. The NeXT workstation was finally launched in 1990. But it was very expensive, so Jobs offered it to the scientific industry. It was on a NeXT computer at CERN that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (www). In 1997 Apple’s management realised that without Jobs, the company would never be as successful as during his era. It therefore decided to buy the NeXT company and so Steve Jobs returned to take charge of Apple.