Add the World Wide Web to the long list of modern marvels Steve Jobs can claim partial credit for.
This, at least, according to a new story from the Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee. It goes like this: After Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he co-founded, in 1985, the Apple visionary began another line of computers under the name NeXT. As you might expect, the user-centered machines were beautiful and well designed. Though NeXT had only limited consumer success, niche groups of professional users found its computers to be great for developing software and Web platforms. At least that’s what Berners-Lee, the man credited for creating the World Wide Web, said about his experience with NeXT in a recent interview.
As first reported by Business Insider, Berners-Lee explained in a roundtable talk at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that, once he was given the go-ahead to pursue the development of his World Wide Web project, he went out and got a “special computer” for the job.
"We bought a cool machine, the NeXT computer. NeXT was a machine made by Steve Jobs when he was kicked out of Apple. … It had a wonderful spirit to it, a really good developer’s environment. … When you opened it, you got a pre-recorded message from Steve that said, ‘Welcome to the NeXT. This is not about personal computing. It’s about ‘inter-personal’ computing.’ And I thought, ‘I can go along with that.’ It was perfect for designing the web."
