The comment missed its impact. The www is developed there first abd without the internet revolution might be delayed. I always thought Steve touched so many IT things but network. Seem the web page missed that.
They showed me what they are working on. And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Maybe the best way to describe NeXT is Jobs getting back to the two other things he missed at Xerox.
[1] https://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2012-03-22/appl...
I've been knowledgeable of NeXT's history for over 15 years (I was a high school student when I first learned of the history of NeXT), but I'm curious about the decisions that led to NeXT picking Mach as opposed to pure 4.2BSD? I'm aware that Avie Tevanian, who was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon who worked on Mach, was an early NeXT hire, and I'm also aware that before Steve Jobs founded NeXT, he led a project called the BigMac which would have integrated the Macintosh with Unix (https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec...). NeXTSTEP could be thought of as a continuation of the BigMac project.
Despite being meant as a research system, Mach2 was effectively 4.3BSD with a good, fast, and scalable VM system. I imagine this had to play a role.
(The Mach VM would be reabsorbed into 4.4BSD and inherited by all the *BSDs -- it's since been replaced in all AFAIK, but still interesting)