Central Processing Unit for Computer

Filed June 30th, 1988

Recognize this machine? It’s the only one in this gallery that wasn’t an Apple, but it surely belongs here. It’s Steve Jobs’ NeXT cube, one of his most wildly ambitious projects. The cube was a commercial failure, but its operating system came to Apple along with Jobs when he returned from exile, and ended up serving as the basis for OS X. In a very real way, every current Mac is a descendant of this computer.