From 1985 to 1996, Jobs worked at NeXT, a company he founded for building workstations aimed at the higher education and business markets, as well as developing software like the NeXTstep operating system. That OS would eventually become a critical component of what would become Mac OSX after Apple bought out NeXT and Jobs was brought back into the fold.
Originally, the orders were to take NeXTstep, slap the Mac OS interface on top of it, and make it look like the current Mac OS. One Apple designer, however, worked on mock-ups of what the OS could look like if the company let its imagination run wild.
"As soon as Steve saw this, he was like, 'this is what we're doing,'" says Mahney. "So Jobs started this project to make Mac OSX with aqua and transparent touches and a very beautiful interface." The eventual result, of course, is what millions of Mac users around the world use today.
