8 ms·
CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
https://archive.is/JfB5V https://archive.is/JfB5V
- rasz 2mo agoI 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.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2mo agoBut they were rather uncomplicated, compared to the BGAed monsters we have now. Infrared heatguns and reflow ovens are nothing new. Neither is liquid cooling.
- rasz 1mo agoThe point is there were no chips to put on the Next Cube that would make it faster in 1988, and the whole system was designed and tuned for specific fixed clock so bus overclocking is also very unlikely. The only possibility is April 1989 announcement of 50 MHz versions of 68030/68882 and Clock Doubler circuit running CPU/FPU fast only when its not touching the bus. Afaik to this day this is the only way to OC Nexts. https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/nextstation-clock-doubler.49799/ https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/nextstation-clock-doubler.4979... https://web.archive.org/web/20190722120829/https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=56.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20190722120829/https://www.nextc... But this still pushes whole thing to ~1990. Would NSA get 20000 highly binned CPUs before actual volume production? Then there is absolute lack of evidence of even one such system ever surviving, and stuff does survive despite being classified, like Tempest IBM 5170s.
- adrian_b 1mo agoNo, that is very wrong. Motorola already had MC88100+MC88200, a RISC CPU with pipelined FPU, which was many times faster than MC68030+MC68882. For floating-point computations it might have been at least 20 times faster than MC68030+MC68882. NeXT had NuBus for expansion cards, so it would not have been any problem to have a NuBus accelerator card with MC88100+MC88200 and a decent amount of memory for that time, e.g. 16 MB or 32 MB. MC88100 had been developed in parallel with MC68030. I remember very well the advertisements for MC88100 from 1988, because for some time it was the fastest monolithic CPU (until Intel launched the similar 80860 a year later, which had a higher clock frequency, because of being made with a newer CMOS fabrication process, the same which was used for the first 80486). The advertisements were that now you could have your own supercomputer by choosing MC88100, instead of paying millions for a Cray. Wikipedia even says that Jobs wanted in the beginning to design NeXT with MC88100, but he switched to MC68030 due to price and availability problems, which should not have been a problem for the CIA.
- wmil 1mo agoThey 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 1mo agoI'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.
- hedgehog 1mo agoFactory overclock, and in those days Motorola could probably have given them a batch of mid-development DSP chips (sort of proto 56002) that could clock much higher and still sit on the unmodified motherboard, max out the scratchpad memory, etc. Then the add-on cards. Anything that was potentially involved in nuclear response decisions probably could get a lot of budget. It would be interesting to inspect the hardware that still exists to see if there are any signs of what exactly actually happened.
- rasz 1mo ago> mid-development DSP chips (sort of proto 56002) "The physical pinout of the DSP56001 is different from the DSP56002" https://digisolutions.de/downloads/Differences56001_56002.pdf https://digisolutions.de/downloads/Differences56001_56002.pd... Buying new unproven workstation just to develop expansion cards to make it fast makes no sense when you can just buy off teh shelf fast SUN or SGI.
- hedgehog 1mo agoI don't know how the contemporaneous IRIS would compare for the target workloads but not necessarily faster than a stock NeXT, let alone one with whatever upgrades the customer wanted to stick in there. The 68000 and by that point the 56000 families both already likely had been proven for similar imaging workloads, with validated code available. At the same time the app dev story with interface builder etc on NeXT was pretty shiny. That compute was a direct component of the latency between something happening on the ground and photos reaching decision makers. In a post-glasnost post-Chernobyl environment with everything shifting around, very valuable to be able to upgrade that workflow rapidly. Someone who was in that group at Motorola in that era would know if there were any special-purpose 56000s that got sold.
- adrian_b 1mo agoThe 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.
- rjsw 1mo agoThe TMS 34010 was also available at that time and could support high resolution screens and accelerated graphics, the article states that it was an Intel graphics card though.
- rasz 1mo ago> faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200 So all Next had to do was 1 Develop another set of ASICs for fully incompatible CPU bus in parallel and in secret 2 Develop another motherboard in parallel and in secret 3 Manufacture another motherboard in parallel and in secret 4 Port NextStep to another fully incompatible CPU arch in parallel and in secret 5 Kill all the developers involved so none of this ever came out > accelerator, on an expansion card graphics on expansion, accelerator on expansion, additional HDD, new color monitor, new OS. Sound like in your alternate reality NSA paid $6K a pop for 20000 magnesium boxes with new incompatible with anything NuBus backplane offering whole 3 free slots, so $2K per slot.
- dang 1mo ago[stub for offtopicness] (we put the gift link above)
- newsoftheday 1mo agoI worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.
- mrhottakes 1mo agoCIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
- high_na_euv 1mo agoAnd somehow people freak out some bullshit about free market when there is gov intervention, even if it is reasonable
- voakbasda 1mo agoLet’s be clear: if the CIA was doing it, then it was not overt and obvious. It was secret manipulation. Is that the kind of government intervention that you want to get?
- mannanj 1mo ago[flagged]
- john_strinlai 1mo agoif you have anyone specific in mind, you should email hn@ycombinator.com if you dont have anyone specific in mind, this comment does nothing except "FUD" edit: really, getting downvoted into oblivion for this? baseless and general accusations of deepstate actors is really what we want the comment sections of hn to be?
- enragebait 1mo agoAbsolutely certainly true. You’re naive if think there is an intelligence organization in the world who can log into the internet who doesn’t scrape analyze and opinionate over the intellectual bastion which is HN.
- john_strinlai 1mo ago
- ParentiSoundSys 1mo ago> 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.
- Lammy 1mo agoIt'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-billionaire-2014-9 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 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
- josefritzishere 1mo agoSteve Jobs was a Fed.
- colesantiago 1mo agoYou forgot the '/s' in your comment.
- superdisk 1mo agoNot sure why this is immediately flagged and buried, there's actual evidence for it. People need to stop being so uptight.
- xhkkffbf 1mo agoThe 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.
- Taikhoom10 1mo ago[dead]
- Alien1Being 1mo agoApple : "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."
- john_strinlai 1mo agojust as a point of comparison, google had 25,879 requests involving 42,500 accounts in approximately the same time period (january 1 through june 2013) google complied with ~65% of the requests ("fun" tidbit: the number for the last half year are 304,915 requests for 748,478 accounts, and google complied with.... 98%!)
- kakacik 1mo agoGoogle's privacy ain't main/one of main selling point since we all know how things work in ad business. If apple was principally against sharing those things they wouldnt be joining the very organization made for that. Plus any public statement from anybody, unless forced by court, shouldnt be taken as facts. We have no way of knowing if it was 25k cases or 25 million cases, and they have no reason to tell such non-public truth if its harmful to them.
- john_strinlai 1mo agomy comment is primarily to give a sense of scale. you don't know whether "4,000 to 5,000 requests" is a lot or a little if you have no point of comparison. i am not commenting on the conclusions, everyone should have the opportunity to draw those themselves.
- hulitu 1mo ago> google had ... requests Official requests.
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- jnaina 1mo agoI 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.
- jongjong 1mo agoIt'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.
- sigbottle 1mo agoI think software, paradoxically, has deeper network and intertial effects than pretty much anything else we have invented so far. Compare the leverage it enables to the ecosystem lock in it forces. With physical goods, it's not nearly that coupled.
- heaney-555 1mo ago>slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever >SpaceX SpaceX has been gaining market share, not losing, and its primary business is Starlink, of which most customers are consumers. (there is also Starshield)
- bigyabai 1mo agoHaving used it, Starlink's entire business model seems to be rooted in handwavium. You'll almost never hit advertised speeds or latency, and there are regular outages where you get no service at all. The cost of the service fluctuates constantly if you don't get locked-in to a specific rate, too. My impression is that Starlink is a hastily-launched DoD project. It's not a broadband replacement and scarcely an alternative to other satnet providers or LTE hotspots.
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoMost Satellite Internet users use Starlink. Most Satellite data (including non internet data) is delivered over Starlink. Most Satellite Internet revenue is from Starlink customers. And I'm sure a certain Eastern European country wouldn't be asking to extend coverage to Russia if it was truly "scarcely an alternative" The cost (actually price) you're complaining about is lower than than other satellite providers and significantly lower than what was available in 2019. Around the pricing of more expensive mobile internet data plans meant for hotspots (in the US) I'm pretty sure no one paying residential pricing back was doing >1TB/month on SATCOM The performance for most users is definitely above the 100/10 99ms advertised (per Ookla) How long are these "regular outages"? Have you used the service in 2026?
- bflesch 1mo agoPeople 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- rjsw 1mo agoIs your idea that NeXT machines had more sharp edges than other computers so would make it easier to collect blood?
- bflesch 1mo agoOther comments tied this report into the cute and nerdy NSA/PRISM scheme of things. That's too easy. If CIA is involved, it's a topic that's actually important for global nobility. CIA scope includes things like Hollywood movie productions, babysitting the next-in-line to the British crown, teen beauty pageants, keeping black people marginalized by dumping excess drugs on them, and of course DNA tracking of Nazis (which has been extended to basically everyone). All this five eyes bs is framed as if the US is in the driving seat, and Americans eat it up with their hubris about "winning" the war of independence. Epstein/Maxwell scandal highlights that James Bond was actually British and not American. It's kinda clever how it all ended up like this and I highly respect the capabilities. It's the best and most prosperous system that humanity has come up with. I sure as hell won't rock the boat. Let's hope this establishment is flexible enough to handle the climate crisis. The solutions proposed so far include more colonization (of other planets) and more castles/bunkers (in remote locations) - there must be better ways to deal with a climate crisis.
- dosisking 1mo ago> Let's hope this establishment is flexible enough to handle the climate crisis. The solutions proposed so far include more colonization (of other planets) and more castles/bunkers (in remote locations) - there must be better ways to deal with a climate crisis. Their solution to the climate crisis is to build as many AI data centers as possible. Turns out they never cared about the climate crisis in the first place, and only wanted to use it to gain power. But now that they have AI, they don't need the climate crisis narrative anymore.
- kevmo 1mo agoWhenever you really start peeling away at Silicon Valley mega tech stories, you mostly find tax dollars.
- otterley 1mo agoA large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. One mustn't underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation. Update: s/majority/amount/
- jandrewrogers 1mo ago> A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. Used to be. The US government only funds 40% of basic scientific research now. This is due to large increases investment from private industry, which now rivals the US government even for basic scientific research in addition to funding the vast majority of other research. US government funding didn't decrease, the pie just became much larger. NSF regularly publishes detailed reports on US R&D funding. The trend toward industry funding eclipsing US government funding started in the 1960s. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20257/trends-in-u-s-r-d-performance-and-funding https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20257/trends-in-u-s-r-d-perfor...
- otterley 1mo agoThat's a great link! Thanks for that :-)
- nunez 1mo agoHence why Silicon Valley started at Silicon Valley. It was (is?) a huge defense contractor outpost.
- briandw 1mo agoWhat's your actually point? Reading between the lines I'm seeing the following logic. 1) The free market develops and sell products. 2) The government buys the products that the free market has produced. 3) Therefore the free market isn't viable without government tax money? Therefore socialism? Silicon Valley wouldn't be as successful without govt spending money on things it needs? Help me out here.
- webdoodle 1mo ago> 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.
- hulitu 1mo ago> 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? " The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. George Orwell "
- comrade1234 1mo agoI 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
- WillAdams 1mo agoYeah, 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.
- jldugger 1mo agoYou 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."
- starik36 1mo agoYep, same expectation, but it's just click bait. I never learn.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- AdmiralAsshat 1mo agoDid you know about the CIA's DECADES-LONG FUNDING of Coca-Cola? I have a hot tip from my good friend the soda machine technician that the CIA regularly funnels THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS a month into the pockets of BIG SODA when they restock their office kitchens and vending machines with Coca-Cola products! This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!
- AndrewKemendo 1mo agoIt’s a good point I’m not sure why we shouldn’t hold other brands accountable for their public relations. I served a long time and if no pizza place would deliver to a military base because they were protesting military action, it would have actually made an impact. To what degree is unknown but I know every dominos in a 20 mile radius from our base was on call to deliver 8000 pizzas from time to time. That aint nothing
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kphorn 1mo agoThe Civil Reserve Pizza fleet always amazed me. About once a quarter, the Air Force Academy would get dominoes pizza for all 4000 cadets. every cadet + staff and some visitors gets a medium pizza for dinner. that's about 4000 pizzas stuffed into the back seats of honda civics from around colorado springs arriving in a 2 hour span. I dont know how they did it but boy could they mobilize
- qwertyuiop_ 1mo agoNow do Anthropic and OpenAI.
- thadk 1mo agoWell, seems like this indicates another long-time and discerning user profile for Apple's pricier XDR display products.
- pjmlp 1mo agoLinuxSE also exists thanks to them.
- hoistbypetard 1mo agoSELinux, and that was NSA.
- pjmlp 1mo agoYeah, I never remember how to type that, and was too lazy to check before posting. While I stand corrected, it isn't much better anyway, in regards of the points of view being discussed towards CIA and software industry.
- drewg123 1mo ago“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.
- palmotea 1mo ago> ...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.
- drewg123 1mo agoAnd the incompetent questions all came from defense contractors..
- kotaKat 1mo agoHey now, Flowers By Irene was just really connected to the World Wide Web back then. Who knew Teleflora was a secret numbers station?
- Fnoord 1mo agoMust be -> could be. Which is the point. And it is an easy way to communicate based on merit. It is likely done from a terminal with 'normal internet access', next to one of the intranet ones (or even airgapped) where the issue is occurring. Even if you'd be able to hack AOL, you'd likely end up on a dead end, or a front company. There's an added bonus: NSA might even know who it was/is internally, so someone who isn't in the 'in group' would get noticed. You can notice something similar on Ghidra or Cyberchef repos. People in government agencies and military follow this M.O. all the time; hiding in plain sight. Nowadays, probably Gmail fullfils the very same role, with a caveat: clearly available world-wide. For Germany, this used to be GMX or T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom).
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- phendrenad2 1mo agoMakes 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ok123456 1mo agoRoss 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.
- creamedcorn 1mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 1mo ago[dead]
- alexthedigger 1mo ago[dead]
- _def 1mo agois archive.is dead?
- seizethecheese 1mo agoDoesn’t work for wsj but not dead
- SllX 1mo agoI just loaded the website after reading your comment, so no.
- rsamtravis 1mo agoIf "buying the products they made" constitutes funding the company then I guess.
- dzonga 1mo agoCIA has funded a lot of things that are of national interest. From Google etc ...
- deepsun 1mo agoI'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.
- yesod 1mo agoWe 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...
- shrubble 1mo agoSun 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.
- alaksj78 1mo ago[dead]
- iberator 1mo agoI read the article. Worth to read. Questions: which Motorola chip CIA wanted? Same for Intel graphics card.
- bmac 1mo agoSteve 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.
- gabrielsroka 1mo ago> one time third party presidential candidate Two time
- johnhtodd 1mo agoI 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.
- bobmcnamara 1mo agoBack in my day the IBM gear had special RF attenuating cases.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoAlmost all computing devices had fairly hardcore RF cage chassis around the internals. Even the humble Atari 2600, if you got a look, was well-shielded. My father purchased a PS/2 Model 50Z for himself, and for me, a PS/2 Model 30 286, and the shielding was likewise impressive. When I went to CompUSA to upgrade to 386, the salesmen were very specific about informing me of the "FCC Class B" ratings. IIRC, the system couldn't be rated FCC Class B unless the motherboard was mated to a particular tower case and sold as a "barebones system". If I wanted to take my chances with separate chassis and bare motherboard, that would not carry the rating and I could cause undue interference at home. I knew this was real important, since my father was a radio guy, and he'd taught me quite a bit about RFI.
- annzabelle 1mo agoI thought this was common knowledge.
- Driftbench 1mo agoGovernment contracts propping up early-stage hardware companies is more common than people think. Being a reliable customer matters more than being a glamorous one.
- m00dy 1mo agonow they are funding grapheneOs
- octocop 1mo agoSo will you tell me Steve Jobs was part of the MK-Ultra project too?
- _the_inflator 1mo agoIt is all in the book from Geoffrey Cain "Steve Jobs in Exile". The reason is also pretty simple and a no right or wrong category answer as well a problem why so many devs suffer with AI: the IT departments at the CIA, NSA etc. were the same guys, that ran Next: Hippies. Hacking systems in the pre AI era was a matter of skills. Today, a matter of the used LLM. I find every indignation embarrassing. The state more or less funded all: hardware, software, directly or indirectly. Call it NASA, science or CIA. I find nothing more pathetic than activists with iPhones. It is like being dependent on drugs but using make up or medication is not part of the equation. You cannot have it all. There is only less wrong or less right, no categorial thinking. Apple China bites them now massively not because due to Trump but due to what Trump told them: China will come for them. Same for Google, who wants to manufacture the Pixel phone outside of Chine in the next years.