Perhaps others knew all about this, but I hadn’t heard about it before. The WSJ yesterday ran a piece about how the CIA had reached out to Jobs during his tenure at NeXT in 1986 to acquire NeXTcubes that they then had equipped with classified custom graphics circuitry and some ESL software wizardry intended for high-res satellite image analysis at NRO. Apparently, they asked Jobs for 20,000 units per month at a time when NeXT was assembling about 500 per month. They signed an agreement and NeXT started shipping Cubes in huge numbers, apparently keeping NeXT afloat at a difficult time.
Link below should be share friendly and outside the paywall.
6 Likes
Reminds me of the TEMPEST-shielded Macs that were disclosed a few decades ago
'Black Mac' Shrouded in Gray Area | WIRED.
Satellite imagery analysis and battlefield mapping seem like a likely applications for graphics-focused workstations like Macintosh or NeXT systems of the era.
(The framing of the WSJ headline as a “debt” Apple/NeXT “owes” for…selling them a product…is a strange one, WSJ. Does Lockheed owe the Air Force a “debt” for selling them F-22s? Surely delivery of the product ordered satisfied any obligation decades ago.)
I think the “debt” is that without that sales contract, NeXT would’ve gone out of business and Apple wouldn’t have acquired it and may never have invited Jobs back to the company. The result being that modern macOS would’ve been completely different from today’s reality.
Lockheed is a big successful company that doesn’t depend on any single contract in order to remain in business.
If they were a small startup dependent on their one and only contract in order to exist, then yes, it could easily be described as a “debt”.
1 Like
CIA used LISP on NEXT to write Reagan’s “Gorby… tear down that wall” speech.