Why the mouse? That was a holdover from Steve’s time at Apple, which was famously “borrowed” from Xerox PARC. Unless next did something special with the mouse that I’m unaware of.
"borrowed" - Apple paid Xerox in stock to have access to their technologies.
Jobs said later that he took away the GUI and the mouse, when he really should have taken away the networking and Smalltalk. That's why NeXT used BSD under the hood and Objective-C as its development environment.
Huh I didn’t know about the stock angle. Apparently it was a purchase agreement since they were pre-IPO, not a giveaway. So he got some pre-ipo financing and a look at great research tech. Very cool deal, thanks for the pointer.
Jobs said later that he took away the GUI and the mouse, when he really should have taken away the networking and Smalltalk. That's why NeXT used BSD under the hood and Objective-C as its development environment.