From the history of Apple: How NeXT went from computers to software

When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, he was by no means idle. With great ambitions, he founded his own company NeXT Computer and focused on the production of computers and workstations for the educational and business sectors. The NeXT Computer from 1988, as well as the smaller NeXTstation from 1990, were rated very well in terms of hardware and performance, but unfortunately their sales did not reach enough to "sustain" the company. In 1992, NeXT Computer posted a $40 million loss. She managed to sell 50 thousand units of her computers.

At the beginning of February 1993, NeXT finally stopped making computers. The company changed its name to NeXT Software and focused exclusively on developing code for other platforms. It was not exactly an easy period. As part of the mass layoff, which earned the internal nickname "Black Tuesday", 330 employees out of a total of five hundred were dismissed from the company, some of whom first learned of this fact on the company radio. At the time, The Wall Street Journal published an advertisement in which NeXT officially announced that it was "releasing software that was locked away in a black box to the world."

NeXT demonstrated the porting of its multitasking operating system NeXTSTEP to other platforms as early as January 1992 at the NeXTWorld Expo. In the middle of 1993, this product was already complete and the company released software called NeXTSTEP 486. NeXT Software products have gained quite a lot of popularity in certain areas. The company also came up with its own WebObjects platform for web applications - a little later it also temporarily became part of the iTunes Store and selected parts of the Apple website.

Source: Cult of Mac