it's a far-fetched idea anyways. It's a five months difference; NeXT in sep '85, and pixar in feb '86. More likely scenario is they wanted to come to market as

it's a far-fetched idea anyways. It's a five months difference; NeXT in sep '85, and pixar in feb '86. More likely scenario is they wanted to come to market as fast as possible with limited resources, so porting Mach kernel and BSD (both proven/robust things) to their platform was probably the fastest route; It'd also have an existing base of developers to attract and carried some weight if they targeted workstation market. edit: this is what made me think why maybe he was influenced, since Steve Jobs did actually launch another "cube" two years before NeXTcube, which was developed in the time before him buying pixar. This thing required an SGI/Sun to be attached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer