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NeXTstation Turbo Color computer (Model: N1200, Serial No. ABC0052649) with keyboard, mouse, and sound box, presented by NeXT Computer Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs to Oracle founder Larry Ellison upon the model's release circa 1992, and later acquired by longtime Oracle engineer Phil Wilson, who subsequently served as Vice President of Human Resources at NeXT Computer. According to Wilson, Jobs gifted the workstation directly to Ellison, who kept and used it in his Oracle office before handing it down to Wilson after he joined the company in December 1992. Wilson continued using the NeXTstation throughout his tenure at Oracle and ultimately purchased it from the company upon his departure in 1997.
Accompanying screenshots further corroborate the workstation's provenance. The operating system remains configured with the hostname "lellison-next," identifying the machine by Larry Ellison's name in both the desktop environment and the system boot logs, while the home directory "pwilson" reflects Phil Wilson's subsequent use after the workstation was handed down to him. Together with Wilson's firsthand account, these surviving system artifacts preserve the computer's documented chain of ownership from Steve Jobs to Larry Ellison and ultimately to Wilson.
Introduced in 1992 as the flagship model of the NeXTstation line, the Turbo Color represented the most powerful desktop workstation produced by NeXT Computer. Powered by a 33 MHz Motorola 68040 processor, it featured advanced 24-bit color graphics, NeXTSTEP's object-oriented operating system, and performance well beyond that of most contemporary personal computers. Designed for software development, higher education, and enterprise applications, the NeXTstation Turbo Color embodied Steve Jobs's vision of a powerful UNIX-based workstation, and NeXTSTEP would later provide the technological foundation for Apple's Mac OS X following Jobs's return to Apple.
