> People don't remember that Silicon Valley was an outpost of the DoD/NSA/CIA for most of the 20th century.

The year was 1986, and President Ronald Reagan was sending billions of dollars to the Pentagon, much of it to fund new technology, including missile defense and spy satellites. Within the national security community, some people understood the importance of the computing revolution unfolding in Silicon Valley—and why they needed to tap into it.

Joe Romello and Jeff Harris were two of those people. Working for what was known as the CIA’s “Program B,” a classified initiative to develop satellite reconnaissance, they believed Jobs, who had formed his new company in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple, could help supply crucial technology for the intelligence community.

NeXT workstations were expensive and out of financial reach for most individuals. Sales to universities, which Jobs hoped would be a major customer, never materialized in large numbers. That left primarily the contract with the CIA, which almost no one knew existed. Publicly, NeXT said it had a contract with the federal government as part of a partnership with ESL.

Only a few people at NeXT knew what was going on when mysterious visitors from Washington showed up at the office, and those employees knew better than to ask too many questions. Dan’l Lewin, whom Jobs had recruited to NeXT from Apple, recalled a half dozen different groups showing up at the office, all looking like “off-the-shelf plain-clothes agents.”

The CIA brought in a team from Sun Microsystems, which had already had dealings with the spy agency, to help Jobs ramp up manufacturing. The first month of production yielded a hundred workstations. Then NeXT boosted output to 1,500 machines a month—then 5,000.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-app … _lead_pos9