Computer company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after his ouster from Apple, sold back to Apple in 1996 for $429M — the acquisition that brought Jobs home and seeded the technology stack for Mac OS X, iOS, and everything that followed. NeXT's workstations were critically admired but commercially niche; its real legacy was NeXTSTEP, the object-oriented OS that became the DNA of modern Apple. See Randall Stross's Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing for the contemporaneous account.