Apple's Secret Debt to the CIA
CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
A new book excerpt reveals how Steve Jobs' company NeXT, which later became the foundation for Apple's resurgence, was secretly funded by the CIA. The intelligence agency invested $100,000 in NeXT through a venture capital firm to gain access to its technology, a fact that remained hidden for decades. This revelation sheds light on the covert relationship between the tech industry and intelligence agencies during the Cold War era.
The CIA's investment in NeXT was a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of people at the agency and at the company.
- jldugger
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."
- Alien1Being
Apple :
"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."
- rsamtravis
If "buying the products they made" constitutes funding the company then I guess.
- dzonga
CIA has funded a lot of things that are of national interest.
From Google etc ...
- mrhottakes
CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
- drewg123
“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.
- comrade1234
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 belt
- newsoftheday
I worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.