You know, when I see the phrase "CIA funding" I expect something like "the CIA put a backdoor in NeXT computers destined for Hungary" or something, not "NeXT made computers and the CIA bought and used them."
Alien1Beingtoday at 3:35 PM
Apple :
"In 2012, Apple joined the PRISM data collection program run by the National Security Agency (NSA)."
"The firm added that between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013 it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data, involving between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. It did not say with how many it had complied."
shrubbletoday at 7:57 PM
Sun Microsystems had hardware and a version of Unix that was POSIX-compliant. This passed the government openness/interoperability test in existence and anyone with authority and budget could buy Sun, and then buy approved applications and run them.
NeXT had a superior development environment, but, Steve Jobs didn't spend the 1 or 2 engineer-years it would have taken to make the OS be POSIX-compliant. Thus, in addition to authority and budget, a waiver needed to be signed off on, in order to buy NeXT hardware.
The "three letter agency" or "TLA" portion of the US government, didn't always need off the shelf apps, but they had to build their own; and they didn't have to pass scrutiny over a waiver for something with a national-security implication.
Thus the CIA, DIA, NSA etc. bought both Sun and NeXT hardware.
drewg123today at 5:14 PM
âNobody had business cardsâ
That sounds accurate. I worked for a NIC company that had one of the first full speed 10GbE packet sniffers in the early 2000s, and some of our customers were 3-letter govt agencies. We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.
yesodtoday at 7:43 PM
We had a Kendall Square Research machine with a NeXT front end. Can't say what it was being used for though, but it did take a lot of security clearances to get into that machine room...
mrhottakestoday at 3:21 PM
CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
newsofthedaytoday at 3:21 PM
I worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.
comrade1234today at 4:55 PM
I vaguely remember going to a presentation by a NeXT engineer about an enterprise objects/webobjects project they did for the USPS where they photograph every letter passing by on a high-speed conveyor, use realtime processing to get the zip code and then sort it onto the correct belt
rsamtravistoday at 7:28 PM
If "buying the products they made" constitutes funding the company then I guess.
ok123456today at 6:55 PM
Ross Perot used his connections, arranged that, and also personally invested in NeXT.
Then Steve Jobs just decided to flake out on them because it wasn't the direction he wanted to take the company.
thadktoday at 5:29 PM
Well, seems like this indicates another long-time and discerning user profile for Apple's pricier XDR display products.
jnainatoday at 4:03 PM
I did not know until now, that I bought a cold war spy artifact from ebay 20 years ago, and shipped it all the way to Singapore.
dzongatoday at 7:28 PM
CIA has funded a lot of things that are of national interest.
From Google etc ...
deletedtoday at 6:13 PM
ParentiSoundSystoday at 3:24 PM
> But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his companyâs future to spies?
That's a funny sentence to read when you know the actual history of LSD, how it was brought to and disseminated throughout the U.S., and the role it played in de-fanging the counterculture.
deepsuntoday at 7:38 PM
I'd say the whole Silicon Valley was almost entirely financed by national security agencies back in its beginning days during the Cold War. Does not mean it's bad.
pjmlptoday at 5:12 PM
LinuxSE also exists thanks to them.
_deftoday at 7:18 PM
is archive.is dead?
rasztoday at 4:07 AM
I dont know if im buying magic CPU upgrade story. CPU/FPU are soldered and non overclockable. Motorola didnt have a super beefed 68030 version, extra special 68882 fpu, nor faster pin compatible 56001. The only socket on board is for 56001 which was already fitted from factory.
Graphics from Intel is much more believable, probably something that later became Intel i860 based NeXTdimension. But that would push whole story a couple years since Intel i860 released mid 1989.
phendrenad2today at 5:38 PM
Makes me wonder what they did when NeXT was subsumed back into Apple. I guess the spy agencies had a lot less pressure on them by that point, so they weren't trying to procure computers from obscure sources to keep foreign spies from interfering.
deletedtoday at 5:25 PM
xhkkffbftoday at 3:26 PM
The NSA bought plenty of the machines back then too. They weren't always the favorites of the staff who spent plenty of time with IBM mainframes.
jongjongtoday at 4:03 PM
It's pretty obvious now that governments have been propping up the tech sector in many countries. It's a weird industry. Look at the biggest tech companies. They all start out with apparently legitimate products but slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever. Look at companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceX, Salesforce... Their main business is extracting money from the government.
bfleschtoday at 4:30 PM
People talk a lot about metadata collection but not about DNA collection.
It is imperative for any intelligence service to know if any politically exposed person has a child, especially if it spawns from an affair. Logically, we have to assume that all laboratories processing human blood are also doing some sort of DNA genealogy.
Taikhoom10today at 3:32 PM
[dead]
dangtoday at 3:15 PM
[stub for offtopicness]
(we put the gift link above)
kevmotoday at 4:38 PM
Whenever you really start peeling away at Silicon Valley mega tech stories, you mostly find tax dollars.
qwertyuiop_today at 5:01 PM
Now do Anthropic and OpenAI.
webdoodletoday at 4:39 PM
> many tech leaders cite patriotism and national renewal in their quest for military contracts, but mutual self-interest is what drove cooperation in the past
How can they be patriots when they do so at the expense of the 1st, 4th, 5th and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution? That's not patriotism, it's terrorism.
creamedcorntoday at 7:12 PM
Misleading headline, AI generated article.
Getting sick of this shit.
Glad I still think for myself unlike a lot of the useful idiots here.