People

Steve Jobs

Legendary founder of Apple Computer, Jobs left shortly after bringing the Macintosh project into harbour. He took five employees from Apple with him to Redwood City to found NeXT Computer. Some ten years later he was asked to return to Apple - and to bring NeXTSTEP, the NeXT operating system, with him. Jobs's theory is that the gap between the best and the average in IT is over 100 to 1, where in other sectors it's a mere 2 or 3 to 1, and so he went hunting for the 'best of the best' until he found them.

Avie Tevanian

One of the principal architects (and programmers) on the MACH project at Carnegie-Mellon University. MACH used a radical approach known as micro-kernel architecture, the idea being to 'outsource' as many tasks as possible outside the operating system kernel to improve stability. Jobs brought him back to Redwood City as chief software architect. Avie is currently in charge of software at Apple Computer.

Jean-Marie Hullot

Creator of the program SOS Interface for the Mac. After a demonstration of SOS Interface in the Redwood City offices, Jobs told him: 'I want that program on our computer'. Hullot stayed and wrote Interface Builder, and in so doing changed the topology of application development forever.

Keith Olhfs

From Adobe, Olhfs came to work for NeXT, where he designed the distinctive NeXTSTEP icons.

Brad Cox

Inventor of the Objective-C programming language. Based on Smalltalk, which Jobs had seen at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center years earlier, it is a superset of C that is extremely easy to learn and is extremely flexible, with both dynamic typing and dynamic binding. Jobs understood his project would need Objective-C, and so NeXT licensed it from Cox's company, Stepstone. Steve Jobs bought the rights to Objective-C from Stepstone in 1995.

The Founders

Randy Heffner, Rich Page, Steve Jobs, George Crow, Gary Moore, Bud Tribble, Dan'l Lewin, Susan Barnes.