Most Mac users that I know these days are relatively new to the platform.  For them, Mac OS X is all that they have ever known.  What most people are unaware of is that Mac OS X was not some shiny new operating system that sprang onto the scene just 9 years ago.  It is derived from an operating system that was first launched in 1989 by a company called NeXT.

NeXT, Inc. was founded by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple in 1985.  After being sidelined by Apple’s board, Jobs took with him some of Apple’s best and brightest employees, some of whom worked on the original Macintosh.  Jobs also recruited Avie Tevanian from Carnegie Mellon University.  Tevanian had been one of the engineers who developed the Mach Kernel.  His work was instrumental in the creation of NeXTSTEP, the operating system created for all of the computers that were manufactured by NeXT.  NeXTSTEP was light years ahead of everything else on the market at the time.    It had many features contained in operating systems today such as multitasking ability that was not common in the late 80′s.  NeXTSTEP, similar to Linux is based upon UNIX which gave it rock solid stability.  NeXTSTEP also incorporated Adobe’s display postscript technology, which is also part of Mac OS X today.  This is what gives Mac OS X its beautiful, smooth appearance on the screen.  NeXTSTEP, like Mac OS X, and the iPhone OS today, incorporated the Objective-C programming language, and included tools for developers to create applications.  Perhaps the most important contribution made by NeXTSTEP was that a NeXT computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web.

Video of Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXTSTEP