The world was not ready in 1988.  Ousted by the Board of Directors, Steven Jobs had left Apple Computer, the company which he had co-founded.  With money from Ross Perot, among others, Jobs identified then-current technologies which he saw as the paths to the future.  From extensive research came a grand leap of faith: NeXTStep.  Jobs was not new to running a company other than Apple.  He had bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas a couple years earlier.

If you happened to wander into the student computer shop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, you saw an array of Apple products lining the walls- monochromatic Cyclopes all.  Walk past them for in the small, dark room off to the side sat one black computer on a pedestal beneath a spotlight.  This was the NeXT computer, too special for mere test drives, though the employees would be only too glad to demonstrate its glorious qualities: built in a completely automated factory; housed in a magnesium case; usable memory on a 256 MB magneto-optical device (10-20 times larger than anything commonly used at the time); 8 MB of RAM (when 1 MB was extensive).  And it cost many thousands of dollars.

Over the succeeding four years, NeXT made extensive improvements to their product line, dropping the price and replacing much of the basic hardware with more practical items.  Concurrently, a gentleman named Tim Berners-Lee did develop a little thing called hypertext on the NeXT computer (the ht in your http).  In 1996, Apple bought NeXT in order to capitalize on its operating system and brought Jobs back into the fold where he remains to this day.  Colorado-based Black Hole, Inc., will gladly sell you a used NeXT computer for significantly less than the original price.

May, 2006