Technology History | 900 Chesapeake Drive — The Company Apple Bought to Get Its Founder Back

On 20 December 1996 Apple announced it was buying the company at this address for about $400 million, and got its founder back in the same transaction.

Steve Jobs had been stripped of operational control at Apple in May 1985 and resigned that September, taking several colleagues with him to start NeXT.

Judged as a hardware company, NeXT did not work. The NeXT Computer arrived on 12 October 1988 at $6,500, the NeXTcube and NeXTstation followed in 1990, and roughly 50,000 machines shipped in total before the company left hardware in 1993.

What Apple actually bought was the software underneath. NeXTSTEP became the foundation of Mac OS X, and through it of the operating system in every iPhone since.

The purchase also restarted a career: Jobs became interim chief executive in September 1997 and dropped the qualifier in January 2000.

Accounts of the deal differ enough to be worth flagging. The figure is variously $400 million or $429 million depending on whether Jobs's Apple shares are counted, and the closing is dated to either 4 or 7 February 1997.

NeXT moved here from Palo Alto in 1989 and took 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive, on the flat industrial ground near the Redwood City port.

Jobs's own business card gave this address, and the offices were fitted out well beyond the company's sales — an open floor plan and a staircase that appeared to float without visible supports, an idea he returned to years later in Apple's stores.

The most consequential machine NeXT ever sold was not used in this building at all.

At CERN, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXTcube and ran the first web server on it by the end of 1990, which is why a company that shipped 50,000 computers matters more than the number suggests.

The site today is unremarkable low-rise commercial property in the Seaport district, occupied since by biotechnology tenants, with nothing marking what was here.

Cover: Berners-Lee's NeXTcube on museum display, still carrying the handwritten label warning that the machine is a server and must not be powered down. It shows the machine, not this address.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.