File:History of NeXT

If you watched my previous video on How Apple and Microsoft Became Rivals, You probably remember that Steve Jobs was fired by Apple’s former CEO John Sculley and board of directors in 1985. And that is where our story begins. Steve told the board he was going to start a new computer company consisting of himself and seven handpicked employees from SuperMicro, the division Steve lead inside Apple responsible for the Macintosh and Lisa systems. While still leading SuperMicro, Steve received a pitch from Paul Berg, a biochemistry professor at Stanford University. Berg wanted a 3M workstation for higher education use with a megabyte of RAM, a megaFLOP of performance, and a display with a resolution of 1200 by 900, or one megapixel. One megabyte of RAM, a megaFLOP chip, and a megapixel display, hence the name 3M. But due to internal turmoil between Steve and the board, he felt it wasn’t smart to ask for tons of money in R&D and marketing to develop this machine. However, when you have your own company, you don’t need approval from anyone to develop a product. So Jobs decided that the 3M computer was going to be NeXT’s first product.