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- Hacker News
- I worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.by newsoftheday
- CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.by mrhottakes
- > 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 company’s 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.
- Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain had a very good section on this. Ross Perot (one time third party presidential candidate) was a big investor in NeXT. Since he had founded 2 IT services companies that had extensive government contracts he was responsible for introducing many government agencies to NeXT and encouraging them to buy NeXT hardware on his personal endorsement. In Geoffrey's telling Steve ultimately blew up these relationships as a result of his immaturity and idealism to NeXT's detriment but he learned these lessons when we returned to Apple and became a more reliable business partner in his 2nd stint running apple.by bmac
- “Nobody had business cards”
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.
by drewg123 - I purchased quite a few of those systems when they came out of production and went into the surplus supply chain. I don't recall anything unusual about the cubes with NeXTDimension boards that were in there though. Some had two boards, which was outrageously over-the-top powerful. There were a lot of slabs that were also labelled "NRO", and I bought lots and lots of them. No hard drives, of course. There was a surplus yard in Maryland that had the contracts for the TLAs. Not open to the public, but if you spent enough and brought donuts, you could clamber across the content of that week's 18-wheeler crammed to the top with magical gear coming out of places that had unlimited budgets and fast replacement cycles. It was legendary. I still have a fax machine somewhere in my dusty piles with "Joint Chiefs of Staff - Whitehouse" property tags.by johnhtodd
- 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.
by shrubble - 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."by jldugger