12 Years Ago Today, Apple Completed the Acquisition of NeXT Computer

NeXT was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California. It developed and manufactured computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets.

It was 1984. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the head of Apple's SuperMicro division, which was responsible for the development of the Macintosh and Lisa personal computers. Jobs was intrigued by the concept for a workstation and contemplated starting a higher education computer company in the fall of 1985. Later that year (after his forced resignation from Apple), Steve Jobs founded NeXT. The company introduced its first computer in 1988. Two years later, a smaller NeXT computer, (the NeXTstation) was released to the public. The computers didn't sell all that great (some 50,000 units are estimated to have shipped in total). However, the OS on those babies was pretty impressing at that time.

NeXT released much of the NeXTSTEP system as a programming environment standard called OpenStep. In 1993, the company withdrew from the hardware business and started focusing on marketing OPENSTEP, its very own OpenStep implementation, for several OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Apple Computer announced an intention to acquire NeXT on December 20, 1996. The purpose was to use NeXTSTEP as a foundation to replace the dated Mac OS operating system.

Also developed by NeXT was one of the first enterprise web application frameworks, WebObjects. WebObjects never became very popular because of its initial high price ($50,000). To this day, it remains a prominent example of a web server based on dynamic page generation rather than static content.

On December 20, 1996 Apple acquired NeXT. The Macintosh maker paid the $429 million in cash, which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs. It is known that Steve Jobs was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal. However, it wasn't until February 4, 1997 that Apple had consummated the deal to purchase NeXT Computers.

Much of the current Mac OS X system is built on the OPENSTEP foundation. WebObjects is now bundled with Mac OS X Server and Xcode.