CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

In 1986, CIA officers turned up unannounced at the headquarters of NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs had founded after being pushed out of Apple in 1985. The Cold War was in full swing, and the Reagan administration was pouring billions into the Pentagon, much of it for missile defense and spy satellites. Joe Romello and Jeff Harris, working for the CIA's classified Program B for satellite reconnaissance, believed Jobs could supply crucial technology for the intelligence community.

They asked to speak with him about “defense-related issues, specifically intelligence,” without giving details — the work was classified. When Romello later caught up with Jobs in New York, he laid out what he wanted: to buy NeXT workstations for an undisclosed customer. “Is it more than 20,000? That’s what I want to buy: 20,000 units,” Romello said, asking for two modifications — a faster Motorola chip and a special Intel graphics card. The customization was done aftermarket by the agency's own proxies.

Who the real buyer was

Publicly, NeXT described its federal work as a partnership with ESL, a Silicon Valley defense company whose president, Robert Kohler, was a former senior CIA official. The agency's involvement was shielded even inside government: the National Security Agency was the official buyer, according to Dain Ehring, who worked with Romello on the contract. Jobs was eventually granted a top-secret clearance so he could visit classified facilities. The CIA brought in a team from Sun Microsystems to help NeXT ramp up manufacturing — a first month of a hundred workstations, then 1,500 machines a month, then 5,000.

What the NeXTcubes did

The workstations went to analysts at the National Reconnaissance Office, who used NeXT's high-resolution screens and specialized chips to scan satellite imagery — to detect whether a country had moved its military, for instance, or was building a missile silo. The machines also let analysts build and share briefings for lawmakers or the president, combining voice-over-video, still images and annotations.

Why it still matters

In 1996 Apple announced it was buying NeXT and Jobs returned to the company he had co-founded, later regaining control and redefining the music industry with the iPod and iTunes. The DNA of NeXT's operating system, NEXTSTEP, became the foundation for Apple's products, from Macs to iPhones.