A company founded by Steve Jobs in 1986 to manufacture workstation computers specifically designed for the educational market that were based around Motorola 68030 microprocessors. The workstations were a notorious flop and were taken off the market in 1993 but the microkernel based operating system called NeXTStep continued to be developed and was later used as the basis for Mac OSX.

NeXTStep

Th NeXTStep operating system was designed by a team led by Avie Tevanian, but he had been a member of the team that designed the Mach Microkernel at the Carnegie Mellon University alongside the BSD UNIX like personality for it. NeXTStep is basically a version of the Mach kernel and the UNIX personality with a layer of object-oriented user interface on top, that is implemented in Objective C.