delayed and it soon became obvious it would not fit the bill. So CEO Gil Amelio started shopping around for a modern OS to buy, and after a while, a consensus started to emerge on Jean-Louis Gassée’s BeOS. Gassée was the former Apple France executive who was supposed to replace Steve Jobs as the head of the Macintosh division in 1985. He had since left Apple and started his own company, Be Inc., whose software had everything Apple needed, including the good taste of running natively on Apple’s products.

However some NeXT employees called up Apple and told them about their own system, the very advanced NeXTSTEP, that had always been regarded as one of the best software platforms on the planet. Steve Jobs learned about it later and he was stunned. But in December 1996, he showed up at Apple for the first time in eleven years and not only convinced the board of using his technology, but also to buy his company. Apple agreed to pay more than $400 million for NeXT,