Consumer TechSilicon Valley / Bay Area

NeXT Computer

Consumer Tech · Redwood City, CA

The workstation company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 after being forced out of Apple (Redwood City). Its NeXTSTEP OS — object-oriented, BSD-Unix-based — was ahead of its time (the World Wide Web was built on a NeXT machine). NeXT's lasting impact ran two ways: Apple acquired it in 1996, making NeXTSTEP the foundation of Mac OS X (BSD/Darwin) and returning Jobs to Apple; and via Jobs — who simultaneously owned and funded Pixar — it underwrote the computer-animation revolution. Never a film workstation (SGI/Sun were the boxes Hollywood ran on); NeXT's film reach was entirely through Jobs and Pixar.

Founded

1985

Region

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Investors

People

About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 293

VC / investors 106

Companies 167

Schools 20

Known For

Software

Semiconductors