Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 to start a company called NeXT. The NeXT computer was intended to be an affordable supercomputer running Unix and aimed at the academic market.

When the NeXT computer launched in 1988, Jobs felt confident it would change the world of computing. Unfortunately for Jobs, the NeXT turned out to be a high-profile disaster that wasted $250 million in capital -- $20 million of it from Ross Perot. Later, Perot would comment, "One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to give those young people all that money." (Of course, this mistake was nothing compared to choosing Admiral James Stockdale as his running mate in the 1992 presidential election.)

There's no doubt that the NeXT, a sleek black cube running a 33-MHz Motorola 68030 processor, was a beautiful and powerful machine. But it cost a staggering $6,000, and there wasn't any useful software for it. The lack of software was in part due to Jobs' arrogance. When Bill Gates came to the NeXT offices to discuss developing software for the system, Jobs purportedly let him sit in the lobby for a half-hour in order to prove he didn't need any outside development help. According to an article I read, when Gates was later asked if Microsoft would develop software for NeXT, he said, "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."

Despite its failure -- only about 50,000 were ever produced -- the NeXT computer has had two important impacts on the history of computing. First, it was the system that Tim Berners-Lee used to develop the World Wide Web. And second, the NeXT system lies at the heart of Apple's new OS X.