In 1993, Steve Jobs was largely absent from public following his departure from Apple in 1985. Jobs had founded #NeXT, a company that produced high-end #Unix workstations, but it struggled commercially. The entry-level NeXT workstation was priced around $5,000—approximately $15,000 in today’s money—yet it was by far the cheapest Unix system available at the time, even making a true Unix system accessible to ambitious home users.