Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT in late 1985 with the intent of developing a 3M computer: 1 MB of memory, 1 million pixels and 1 million instructions per

Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT in late 1985 with the intent of developing a 3M computer: 1 MB of memory, 1 million pixels and 1 million instructions per second; or powerful enough to run wet lab simulations. Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 when they developed their own computer systems. Luxo Jr. was shown at SIGGRAPH that same year, one part advertisement for their computer, and one part fun hobby project because some of the Pixar guys aspired to one day do a fully computer animated full length feature film of their own. This worked out very very well for them. Eventually, but they also stopped developing the Pixar Computer System in 1990 in part because Jobs was losing a lot of money propping up both NeXT and Pixar. Development of NeXTSTEP began in 1986 under Avie Tevanian based upon the Mach kernel he had co-developed at Carnegie Mellon which was developed with the intention to replace the kernel in BSD, which at this point I believe is still just BSD and years away from fragmentation. NeXTSTEP 0.8 was previewed in October 1988 and all the core pieces were there: the Mach kernel, BSD, DriverKit, AppKit, FoundationKit, Objective-C runtime, and the NeXTSTEP GUI. 1.0 came in 1989. IRIX 3.0 was released in 1987 debuting the 4Sight window manager which isn’t too similar to what was released in NeXTSTEP but does use NeWS and IRIS GL, however it was based on System V UNIX. It’s not until Pixar started making movies, I think actually starting with Toy Story, that they bought Silicon Graphics workstations. For Toy Story, the render farm also started off using SGI but eventually moved to Sun computers. So if anything, IRIX and NeXTSTEP are probably a decent example of convergent evolution given they were both (at least initially) in the business of making high end graphical workstations and neither needed to reinvent the wheel for their target market.