To a great degree, NeXT was comprised of an assemblage of talent and technologies which Steve Jobs put together:
- Mach microkernel --- Avie Tevanian may well be the most heavily recruited computer science student in history with offers from AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, and NeXT
- Interface Builder --- Jean-Marie Hullot originally did a graphical layout system for developing on the Mac
- Display PostScript --- to a great degree, NeXT was responsible for this
- Objective-C --- as noted elsethread this was worked up by Brad Cox at Stepstone
and, of course they licensed Unix from AT&T (and other bits from other sources such as a Pantone color library, or Webster's dictionary for Webster.app, and Mathematica from Wolfram was included early on).
Quartz, née Display PDF is a nice alternative (and is probably even more reliable these days), but I still miss Display PostScript and the ability to program custom fills/strokes and so forth --- huge potential security hole as Frank Siegert's "Project Akira" showed though.
- Mach microkernel --- Avie Tevanian may well be the most heavily recruited computer science student in history with offers from AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, and NeXT
- Interface Builder --- Jean-Marie Hullot originally did a graphical layout system for developing on the Mac
- Display PostScript --- to a great degree, NeXT was responsible for this
- Objective-C --- as noted elsethread this was worked up by Brad Cox at Stepstone
and, of course they licensed Unix from AT&T (and other bits from other sources such as a Pantone color library, or Webster's dictionary for Webster.app, and Mathematica from Wolfram was included early on).
Wish my Cube hadn't stopped booting up...