* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, from Pink/Taligent and BeOS to OS/2 and WinNT. But it's worth asking where Jobs and the other Big Mac supporters got the idea from in turn. One obvious source of inspiration for the NeXT work was Xerox PARC, and Jobs seems to have been acknowledging (or claiming) that influence in the famous clip from the 1995 Triumph of the Nerds "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 . Furthermore Alan Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 https://www.quora.com/What-was-Alan-Kays-experience-like-wor... . But there were plenty of other, very immediate possible inspirations for Big Mac in the commercial workstation market. There was high-end stuff like Apollo/Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain or Lisp machines, but above all there was Sun. By 1983 the Sun-2 workstations had proven that you could already get a real Unix running on a desktop machine, using the same m68k architecture family as the Mac, that you could put a PARCish GUI on top of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView and that you could make money selling it. And on the other hand Sun's high prices and gimcrack user experience would have bred confidence that Apple could do much better, at least with a couple more years for prices to decline. I can't think of anything to confirm that Sun was an influence, but it more or less has to have been.

* What about the networking, though? (Apart from all other possible inspirations, Sun was already trumpeting that "the network is the computer" by this time.) There's no mention anywhere of any network port on any Big Mac prototype, and it seems reasonable to assume that Big Mac was intended to have no integrated networking hardware. But I don't think this indicates that networking was unimportant to the Big Mac vision. Jobs put plenty of emphasis on networking in his February 1985 Playboy interview https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_19... , and he seems to have been very much on board with (and likely involved with?) Apple's efforts to roll out a LAN offering in 1984 and 1985 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 . I think the most likely explanation was that, like the non-colour screen, this was a cost-driven decision. In 1985 integrated networking would have been expensive and useless to most modem users, and vice versa, while many users weren't yet ready to pay for either LAN or dial-up hardware. And of course networking hadn't yet really converged on (not-quite-)RJ45 Ethernet—Apple itself had only just started pushing AppleTalk!—so even for LAN users there was a good chance that any integrated LAN hardware would be an expensive waste.

* That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented" element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I have no idea.

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