CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

Did 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!

But that sort of analysis would prevent you from dropping a wikipedia link about something only somewhat related, and then implying that EVERYTHING is backdoor'd by the government.

Or explicit investment, as with the many companies that were partially funded through In-Q-Tel. This is a strange article. All government agencies acquire computers for normal operations.

It is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"

Yep, same expectation, but it's just click bait. I never learn.

I'd trust my own intuitive suspicions more than official claims by the CIA.

just 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%!)

I didn’t find this in the article where did this come from? I remember when Apple suddenly shutdown the developer network to deal with a security breach in 2013.

https://giga.law/daily-news/2013/07/22/apples-developer-site...

Whatever number they give publicly on how many US law enforcement requests they received you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA which is probably everything in their cloud all of the time. We know they backdoored the devices (https://www.cultofmac.com/news/nsa-spyware-allegedly-gives-b...)

You understand that there is difference between US law enforcement and the intelligence community? And that all service providers are required, by law in almost ALL countries, to respond to legal requests from their governments? What you are citing is not any serious evidence of some shadowy conspiracy between apple and the "government".. Not that I believe Apple's bullshit about protecting users privacy, but you're grasping at straws there.

> ...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.

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.

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.

Those sub-miniature microphones and speakers in your phones? More CIA investment, eventually commercialized by companies like Knowles.

they were an early sponsor of the research that yielded relational databases, so I guess we can thank them for Oracle as well

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.

...and from US military perspective, a lot of these "investment" paid in the end to their favour, Id say?

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.

And somehow people freak out some bullshit about free market when there is gov intervention, even if it is reasonable

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.

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

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.

According to the article, budgets were cut when the USSR fell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 "

I 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.

>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)

Microsoft's main business... is extracting money from the government.

Please, elaborate on where Microsoft is getting a hundred billion dollars plus per year from the government.

By an extreme margin Microsoft's main business is productivity software sold to businesses and consumers and has been for 40 years, along with Windows (the majority customers for which are businesses + consumers).

What's fascinating to me is just how many people in the American tech industry are in complete denial about the amount of government support their industry receives and by extension that they personally receive.

All too often someone who espouses libertarian or ultra free-market capitalist beliefs will smugly state that Silicon Valley is proof that America and free market ideals are better than another country such as say Norway, Finland, or Estonia.

I've never really had a good way to respond to that kind of belief in part because I'm not too well versed in the history of intelligence agencies funding American tech industries or the contemporary state of that relationship but also because it's so startlingly ubiquitous and adamant.

Does anyone else have any input on how it's best to address this misconception and worldview that people in SV have?

A 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/

Hence why Silicon Valley started at Silicon Valley. It was (is?) a huge defense contractor outpost.

Last time I went to donate blood, I read all the fine print they asked me to sign, and I was giving them the right to sequence my DNA (!)

The tech taking my blood had no idea; nobody else had ever read it.

I did complain and ask the blood donation org to make sequencing opt-in and my message was "passed on to leadership" but with no followup from "leadership."

Twist on that was the fake immunization campaigns run in Pakistan so as to find relatives of Osama Bin Laden.

Or, just check Strom Thurmond's list of children on Wikipedia.

Is your idea that NeXT machines had more sharp edges than other computers so would make it easier to collect blood?

ew paywall

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9?...