16/02/18

Steve Jobs will always be remembered as the man behind Apple. Truth is, there are (or were) several other companies which he launched and/or helped develop. NeXT is one of such companies.

Check out: Remembering The Design Legacy Of Steve Jobs’s Other Great Computer Company

.

Listen

QR Code

.

Glossary

  • eponymous – (of a person) giving their name to something; (of a thing) named after a particular person or group
  • staggering – astonishing
  • outré – unusual and typically rather shocking
  • jump shipliterally leave the ship on which one is serving without having obtained permission to do so; figuratively quit working at a company
  • cast – an object made by shaping molten metal or similar material in a mould
  • mould – a hollow container used to give shape to molten or hot liquid material when it cools and harden
  • legacy – something left or handed down by a predecessor

.

Think about it

Answer the questions below.

  • What were some basic differences between NeXT and Apple, in terms of the product offered and the company’s mission.
  • What was the deal between Rand and Jobs?
  • What complaint did Jobs have about the logo? How did this finish?
  • Who was Hartmut Esslinger? What did he do when Jobs started NeXT?
  • What was one of the reasons why NeXT computers didn’t sell well?
  • What legacy did NeXT leave behind?

.

Practice makes perfect

Fill in the blank spaces with the missing words. Use ONE word per blank space.

NeXT’s design legacy reaches beyond ________ hardware and logo. Do you use a Mac? OS X is a modified version of NeXTStep, the operating system Jobs created for NeXT. And because they were graphical powerhouses, NeXT computers were responsible ________ many of the advances in 3-D graphics that came out of ________ late ’80s and ’90s. Not only ________ we owe games such as Doom and Quake to NeXT computers, we ________ owe NeXT for empowering programmers who created revolutionary new techniques in computer graphics that are still used in computer-animated blockbusters and Oculus Rift games ________ this day. Apple became a design-thinking company ________ accident, but NeXT was one ________ purpose, and it revolutionized the world. If that’s Steve Jobs’s “biggest failure,” it’s ________ shame he didn’t fail more often.

.

Explore it more

(495)