In the mid-1980s, as Steve Jobs struggled to keep his post-Apple venture NeXT alive, an unexpected lifeline arrived from the CIA.
During the height of the Cold War, intelligence officials sought advanced computing power for satellite reconnaissance and battlefield intelligence. Their interest in NeXT’s technology helped sustain the company long enough for Apple to later acquire it— bringing Jobs back and providing the foundational operating system that would power the modern Mac and iPhone.
This surprising chapter of Silicon Valley history, drawn from Sharon Weinberger’s forthcoming book Valley of Death, reveals the hidden debt Apple owes to U.S. intelligence funding.
Sharon Weinberger via The Wall Street Journal:
When the CIA dropped in unannounced at the headquarters of Steve Jobs’s new computer company, NeXT, the Cold War was in full swing.
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…
Jobs would not have been totally surprised to learn the CIA was asking to speak to him.
In addition to starting NeXT, in February of 1986 he had acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilms, which made the Pixar Image Computer. Jobs’s controlling interest in the newly spun out company came with an unexpected piece of technology: Pixar had been working with ESL, a Silicon Valley defense company, and had custom-built a computer for intelligence analysts to assess satellite images.
MacDailyNews Take: NeXTSTEP (later OPENSTEP) became the foundation of Apple’s modern operating systems after Apple acquired NeXT in 1997.
Steve Jobs’s NeXT company had built an advanced Unix-based OS with a Mach kernel, BSD components, object-oriented frameworks (Foundation and AppKit), and Objective-C. Apple used this technology to create Mac OS X (now macOS), replacing the aging classic Mac OS. Its core, known as Darwin/XNU, plus the Cocoa frameworks are direct descendants of NeXTSTEP.
Apple then adapted the same shared foundation for mobile and other platforms:
• iOS (and later iPadOS) uses the identical Darwin/XNU kernel and core libraries, with UIKit evolved from AppKit concepts for touch interfaces.
• watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS are further specialized variants built on the same underlying kernel, frameworks, and runtime.
This common NeXTSTEP-derived architecture is why Apple’s operating systems share so much code, security model, and developer tools today.
You can read the full excerpt from Weinberger’s book via Apple News here.
The book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War by Sharon Weinberger is available via Amazon here.
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It’s not often one acknowledges a debt to the CIA. It’s most often “owes a death” to the CIA.
After all the brainiac developments re: the OS, here we are today…the anti-brainiac (Siri) holds a big key for the future.