I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted.

    Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for."

    Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!"

    "Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too."

    "A what?"

    "A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation."

But wikipedia lists Paul Berg as the inspiration.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT:

    Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.

Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.