The most advanced UNIX technology was being developed at Carnegie-Mellon, where Steve hired some of his best programmers, such as Avie Tevanian. He was also told about object-oriented programming, a breakthrough from Xerox PARC which made software development very fast and efficient. So Steve knew his priorities for the NeXT operating system: it would be a UNIX object-oriented system — on top of which would be added a graphical user interface, to make it user-friendly. These were the very ambitious foundations of NeXTSTEP, so ambitious that it would take several years before they would give birth to a stable operating system.

Second, of course, was hardware. Steve had been