The NuMachine was developed in the late 1970s at
MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) by Professor Steve Ward and his research group in concert with Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital Corporation is one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world. It has a long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker and a storage products company. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970 by Alvin B...

. It was a project to design a computer workstation that interfaced with local area networks using microprocessors. It included a new operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 called Trix, which the GNU Project

GNU Project

The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...

 used for its first attempt at an operating system kernel.

The NuMachine was first developed commercially by Western Digital. It was bought by Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

 in 1983. Texas Instruments dropped the NuMachine development in 1985 in favor of the TI Explorer

TI Explorer

The Texas Instruments Explorer is a family of Lisp Machine computers. These computers were sold by Texas Instruments in the 1980s. The Explorer is based on a design from Lisp Machines Incorporated, which is based on the MIT Lisp Machine....

.

Its main legacy was a bus architecture called NuBus

NuBus

NuBus is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus and the NuMachine was done by Western Digital for their NuMachine, and for the Lisp Machines Inc. LMI-Lambda. The NuBus was later...

 that was later adopted by Apple Computer

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

 for its Macintosh II

Macintosh II

The Apple Macintosh II was the first personal computer model of the Macintosh II series in the Apple Macintosh line and the first Macintosh to support a color display.- History :...

 and by NeXT

NeXT

Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...

, and influenced the design of the PCI bus.