After Steve Jobs was unceremoniously booted from Apple Computer in 1985 (he actually resigned after being pressured out), he took a core group of employees and started NeXT, Inc.
NeXT had a variety of business models and products both hardware and software. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer in 1991 to create the first web browser and web server; accordingly, NeXT was instrumental in the development of the World Wide Web.
In the early 1990s John Carmack used a NeXTcube to build two of his pioneering games, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Oh yeah, and they pioneered object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and web application servers which enabled dynamic page generation based on user interactions as opposed to static content.
