As a company, Apple has a very long history but Mac OS X’s history is actually more closely tied to its current CEO, Steven P. Jobs. Although Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers, now Apple Inc., with his friend Steve “Woz” Wozniak, he was demoted from his executive position on May 31, 1985 and then resigned on September 13, 1985. During his time away he formed a company by the name of NeXT Inc. Steve Jobs’ new company was in business from 1985 until December 20, 1996 when it was bought out by Apple.

The seed was planted for Mac OS X’s birth in 1985 when Steve Jobs met with Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate and biochemist from Stanford, at an event held in Silicon Valley. Berg complained to Jobs about the of expense in teaching students about recombinant DNA from textbooks instead of in the wet lab. Berg explained to Jobs that he needed Apple to create something similar to a 3M workstation, due to the fact that they had more than 1MB of RAM, a megapixel display and over a megaflop of performance.

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