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- Hacker News
- 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.
by rasz - But they were rather uncomplicated, compared to the BGAed monsters we have now. Infrared heatguns and reflow ovens are nothing new. Neither is liquid cooling.
- I'd be willing to believe in factory overclocks, one magic speed bin that wasn't common enough to market to the public, but was common enough to yield a few here or there. I worked at a place that was able to secure factory overclocks from Intel, 100MHz faster than what everyone else was buying.by jeffbee
- They were probably talking about an accelerator card. That would make sense if the writer isn't familiar with them and Romello wanted to simplify things a bit and just called it a compute upgrade or something.by wmil
- The faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200, which had been developed concurrently with MC68030. So Motorola really had a faster alternative at that time. Moreover, Wikipedia says that Jobs actually wanted in the beginning to design NeXT with MC88100, not with MC68030, but he gave up due to problems with price and availability.
That was a RISC CPU many times faster than MC68030+MC68882 (it had a pipelined FPU, like Intel 80860 and the much later Intel Pentium, so for number crunching it was more than an order of magnitude faster than MC68030+MC68882).
It probably was used as an accelerator, on an expansion card. NeXT had NuBus for expansion cards. I do not know if it had enough connectors for the 2 expansion cards wanted by CIA, but if any customization was done it must have consisted in providing enough NuBus connectors.
The Intel graphics could have been Intel 82720, a clone of NEC μPD7220, which could do by itself simple 2D graphics tasks (like drawing lines and arcs, filling polygons and copying the font bitmaps for rendering character strings), freeing the main CPU.
By the end of 1990, my company bought what at that time were expensive workstation variants of an IBM PC/AT clone, which had some huge monitors with higher resolution than supported by VGA, for which an expansion card with Hitachi HD63484 was used to provide really impressive graphics.
Intel 82720 was similar to Hitachi HD63484, but HD63484 was more recent and it had more features, e.g. it supported up to 4k resolution (but 4k monitors were extremely rare and expensive in 1990, so we had only monitors with 768x1024 @ 16 bit per pixel, which was still excellent for that time).
So I assume that a similar card was referred to in the article.
We used our HD63484 card only with AutoCAD, because it was the only program that had graphics drivers for it. The rest of the programs used a standard VGA card and a VGA monitor.
I assume that a similar dual monitor arrangement must have been used by CIA/NSA with NeXT, so their special application program must have used their graphics card with a big monitor, while the standard NeXT programs must have used the original NeXT graphics.
by adrian_b - 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.
by ok123456 - 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...by yesod
- 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 beltby comrade1234
- Yeah, Rob Blessin of Black Hole Computing bought the Cubes and Slabs (sans hard drives) when the CIA moved on to white hardware. At the time, I didn't have the need/funds for a spare, but did grab a NeXT-branded Canon inkjet printer.by WillAdams
- 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
- And somehow people freak out some bullshit about free market when there is gov intervention, even if it is reasonableby high_na_euv
- ...and from US military perspective, a lot of these "investment" paid in the end to their favour, Id say?
- that's why they're called "the company" in insider circles. they still do, openly and probably also covertly. their investment arm is called in-q-tel https://www.iqt.org/portfolio , funding things like gitlab and docker. they probably run half of silicon valley. the dead giveaway is a funding story about 2 guys in a garage or dorm.
- American industries that is. (I’m currently reading the new Economic Hitman.)by teekert
- they were an early sponsor of the research that yielded relational databases, so I guess we can thank them for Oracle as well
- It's not like CIA has some mastermind strategy, it is also a preferred career for old money nepo kids who gain quasi-global legal immunity from these government roles. CIA job is much better than being a honorary consul for some shithole just to evade parking tickets.
If those nepo kids like to mingle in the NYC artsy scene, then that's where the funds flow.
by bflesch - Those sub-miniature microphones and speakers in your phones? More CIA investment, eventually commercialized by companies like Knowles.by joezydeco
- CIA funding helped keep Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock afloat, serving as propaganda for freedom of expression and individualism in contrast to Soviet collectivism.by dataviz1000
- > 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.
- Also didn't pretty much every tech guru from that time (if not from all time) drop acid? Gates certainly did, and more than once.by Apocryphon
- It's also a funny sentence to read when you're familiar with Jobs' close personal relationship with Larry Ellison: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a...
Fun fact: Ellison was the one who orchestrated Jobs' late-'90s return to Apple (after failing to purchase Apple outright) as part of a decades-long campaign of trying to help the spy sector take General Purpose Computing away from people. In the '90s their preferred approach to this was ‘Network Computing’, and Apple almost shipped a ‘Macintosh NC’ that would have connected to Oracle software on its backend, but that project turned into the iMac instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_NC
“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?
A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.
Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
―― Larry Ellison, 1997, https://youtu.be/qriZvWzNPho?t=420
They were finally able to do it with the iPhone by leveraging nerds' well-intentioned-but-naïve weakness to the fallacy that More Encryption == Better Than, so now we all have what could be General Purpose Computers in our pockets that just refuse to run any software that The System doesn't want us to have.
The moral of the story is don't trust anybody who expresses too much interest in putting things inside Black Cubes :p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
by Lammy - 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
- > one time third party presidential candidate
Two time
by gabrielsroka - “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 - Funny
You know there's the "excessive formalism and thorough certifications" for some gov positions (sounds like red lamp), but I don't doubt there's the "you didn't see anything" level where the objective is to pretend it's just a disinterested party asking some funny questions.
by raverbashing - >We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.
I suppose this is the equivalent to how the first delivery of funds to Lockheed to build the U-2 was sent to Kelly Johnson's home as opposed to his Skunk Works office.
by TMWNN - > ...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.
You'd think they could at least setup a front company at least. Using AOL addresses that way seems too suspicious. Competent person using AOL with a weird technical question? Must be the NSA.
by palmotea - 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
- Back in my day the IBM gear had special RF attenuating cases.by bobmcnamara