NeXT in the context of "Steve Jobs"

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley, best known for its consumer electronics, software and online services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Company by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the company was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. the following year. It was renamed to its current name in 2007 as the company had expanded its focus from computers to consumer electronics. Apple has been described as a Big Tech company.

The company was founded to market Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Its successor, the Apple II, became one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputers. Apple introduced the Lisa in 1983 and the Macintosh in 1984 as some of the first computers to use a graphical user interface and a mouse. By 1985, internal conflicts led to Jobs leaving the company to form NeXT and Wozniak withdrawing to other ventures; John Sculley served as CEO for over a decade. In the 1990s, Apple lost considerable market share in the personal computer industry to the lower-priced Wintel duopoly of Intel-powered PC clones running Microsoft Windows, and neared bankruptcy by 1997. To overhaul its market strategy, it acquired NeXT, bringing Jobs back to the company. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability by introducing the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices; creating the iTunes Store; launching the "Think different" advertising campaign; and opening the Apple Store retail chain. Jobs resigned in 2011 for health reasons, and died two months later; he was succeeded as CEO by Tim Cook.

macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a proprietary Unix-based operating system, derived from OPENSTEP for Mach and FreeBSD, which has been marketed and developed by Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and laptop computers, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows and ahead of all Linux distributions, including ChromeOS and SteamOS. As of 2025, the most recent release of macOS is macOS 26 Tahoe, the 22nd major version of macOS.

Mac OS X succeeded the classic Mac OS, the primary Macintosh operating system from 1984 to 2001. Its underlying architecture came from NeXT's NeXTSTEP, as a result of Apple's acquisition of NeXT, which also brought Steve Jobs back to Apple. The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released on March 24, 2001. Mac OS X Leopard and all later versions of macOS, other than OS X Lion, are UNIX 03 certified. Each of Apple's other contemporary operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, audioOS and visionOS, are derivatives of macOS. Throughout its history, macOS has supported three major processor architectures: the initial version supported PowerPC-based Macs only, with support for Intel-based Macs beginning with OS X Tiger 10.4.4 and support for ARM-based Apple silicon Macs beginning with macOS Big Sur. Support for PowerPC-based Macs was dropped with OS X Snow Leopard, and it was announced at the 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference that macOS Tahoe will be the last to support Intel-based Macs.

Henry Ross Perot (/pəˈroʊ/ pə-ROH; June 27, 1930 – July 9, 2019) was an American businessman, politician, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Data Systems and Perot Systems. He ran an independent campaign in the 1992 U.S. presidential election and a third-party campaign in the 1996 U.S. presidential election as the nominee of the Reform Party, which was formed by grassroots supporters of Perot's 1992 campaign. Although he failed to carry a single state in either election, both campaigns were among the stronger presidential showings by a third party or independent candidate in U.S. history.

Born and raised in Texarkana, Texas, Perot became a salesman for IBM after serving in the United States Navy. In 1962, he founded Electronic Data Systems, a data processing service company. In 1984, General Motors bought a controlling interest in the company for $2.4 billion ($6.1 billion in 2024). Perot established Perot Systems in 1988 and was an angel investor for NeXT, a computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple. Perot also became heavily involved in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, arguing that hundreds of American servicemen were left behind in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. During the presidency of George H. W. Bush, Perot became increasingly active in politics and strongly opposed both the Gulf War and the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.

Workstations formerly offered higher performance specifications than mainstream personal computers, especially in terms of processing, graphics, memory, and multitasking. Workstations are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulations like computational fluid dynamics, animation, video editing, image editing, medical imaging, image rendering, computational science, generating mathematical plots, and software development. Typically, the form factor is that of a desktop computer, which consists of a high-resolution display, a keyboard, and a mouse at a minimum, but also offers multiple displays, graphics tablets, and 3D mice for manipulating objects and navigating scenes. Workstations were the first segment of the computer market to present advanced accessories, and collaboration tools like videoconferencing.

Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum; August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) was an American art director and graphic designer.

He is known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He developed an American Modernistic style from European influences and was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design.

OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification developed by NeXT. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that could run on multiple operating systems, including NeXTSTEP, Windows NT, and various Unix-based systems. It has influenced the development of other GUI frameworks, such as Cocoa for macOS, and GNUstep.

OpenStep was principally developed by NeXT and Sun Microsystems, to allow advanced application development on Sun's operating systems, specifically Solaris. NeXT produced a version of OpenStep for its own Mach-based Unix OS, stylized in all capital letters as OPENSTEP. The software libraries that shipped with OPENSTEP are a superset of the original OpenStep specification, including many features from the original NeXTSTEP.