NeXT workstations let military commanders access satellite imagery directly
In 1986, two CIA officers — Joe Romello and Jeff Harris — arrived unannounced at the headquarters of Steve Jobs’s new computer company, NeXT. They worked on what was known within the agency as “Program B,” a classified initiative to develop satellite reconnaissance technology. President Ronald Reagan was sending billions to the Pentagon at the time, much of it for missile defense and spy satellites, and the two believed Jobs could supply crucial technology for the intelligence community.
Romello and Harris told NeXT staff they wanted to speak with Jobs directly about “defense-related issues, specifically intelligence.” Jobs would not have been entirely surprised by the agency’s interest. He had founded NeXT in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple, and earlier in 1986 he had acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilms — the operation that would become Pixar. The Pixar acquisition came with an unexpected inheritance: Pixar had previously worked with ESL, a Silicon Valley defense company, to custom-build a computer for intelligence analysts assessing satellite images.
Jobs eventually met ESL’s president, Robert Kohler, a former senior CIA official, who told Jobs that what the NeXT computer had been designed to do “for college students and professors and researchers, that’s what the intelligence community does behind the door,” according to Garry Fuller, who worked for ESL at the time and later joined NeXT.
Romello and Harris never got a meeting with Jobs at NeXT headquarters during that first visit. When Romello caught up with Jobs in New York City, he did not say what the CIA had in mind. Jobs did not want to know. “Don’t tell me anything that I’m not supposed to know because I won’t remember to forget,” Jobs told Romello.
Romello laid out what he wanted: to buy NeXT’s workstations for an undisclosed customer. “How many units are you prepared to deliver on an annual basis?” Romello asked. Jobs replied that the figure was “privileged information.” Romello said he wanted 20,000 units per year with two modifications, to be delivered that year.
The modifications — a faster Motorola chip and a special Intel graphics card — were not handled by NeXT. “We never told him what we were really after,” Romello said. “We didn’t give him a copy of the chip. They were done aftermarket by us, by our proxies.” Jobs was eventually granted a top-secret security clearance so he could visit classified facilities.
NeXT desperately needed the sales. The 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 intelligence community, which almost no one knew existed. Publicly, NeXT described the arrangement as a federal contract through a partnership with ESL. Even inside the government, the CIA’s involvement was shielded; the National Security Agency was listed as the official buyer, according to Dain Ehring, who worked with Romello on the NeXT contract.
Only a few NeXT employees knew what was happening when visitors from Washington showed up, and those employees knew better than to ask too many questions. Dan’l Lewin, whom Jobs had recruited from Apple, recalled roughly half a dozen different groups arriving at the office, all looking like “off-the-shelf plain-clothes agents.” “They came in, said, ‘Hi, my name’s Sally.’ ‘My name’s Bill.’ ‘My name’s Sanjay,’ whatever,” Lewin said. “And nobody had business cards. They all smiled and we gave them demonstrations and there were people from ESL in the room because ESL was going to shepherd the whole thing. And they all left and smiled and nodded and didn’t say a word.”
The CIA brought in a team from Sun Microsystems, which had prior dealings with the spy agency, to help Jobs scale manufacturing. The first month of production yielded a hundred workstations; output then rose to 1,500 machines a month, and later to 5,000. The computers were loaded onto unmarked trucks in the early morning and transported to a CIA front company, where the modified chips and visual processors were installed. Once assembled, the units went back onto trucks bound for Moffett Field, a military installation, where they were loaded into C-5 transport planes and flown to classified destinations.
The computers 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, or if it was building a missile silo. The workstations also allowed analysts to create and share briefings for lawmakers and the president that incorporated voice-over-video, still images, and annotations. More consequentially, the NeXTcubes allowed data to be shared across intelligence networks, putting freshly collected images in the hands of military personnel around the world and enabling analysis in near real time. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, but thanks to the NeXT, the intelligence community essentially had its own functioning internet, Romello said. “We didn’t use the word internet back then, but we called it just a ‘wide area network,’ or what have you.”
As more members of the military began seeing the images themselves, they no longer had to rely solely on analysis from intelligence agencies. NeXT put raw intelligence into the hands of battlefield commanders at bases around the world, who could interpret the imagery “through their eyes in near real time,” Romello said. The effect was to challenge the CIA’s longstanding culture of centralized intelligence. This, Romello said, was “the biggest unintended consequence” of the new computers.
NeXT was integrated into the spy agencies just as their mission was about to change. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the United States moved from being one of two superpowers to being the sole dominant power in a world of new threats: rogue states, the rise of China, terrorism. Jobs, however, was not destined to play a role in that new era for long. Harris, who had accompanied Romello to NeXT headquarters and later became head of the NRO, recalled a meeting with Jobs in the mid-1990s in which the entrepreneur told him: “I’m going to redefine the music industry.” Harris said he had no idea what Jobs was talking about at the time, but eventually understood.
In 1996, Apple announced it was buying NeXT, and Jobs returned to the company he had co-founded. A few years later he regained control of the entire enterprise, putting it on a trajectory to become the world’s most valuable brand — and, as promised, redefining the music industry with the iPod and iTunes. Although NeXT’s presence in popular culture was overshadowed by Apple, the DNA of its operating system, NEXTSTEP, became the foundation for Apple’s products, from Macs to iPhones.
Apple never became a major military contractor the way NeXT had been. After the Cold War ended, defense spending dropped nearly 30% by the end of the 1990s, just as the commercial market for personal computers was exploding. When the interests of Silicon Valley diverged from those of the military and intelligence worlds, the connection withered. Now, as the Pentagon aims to spend more than a trillion and a half dollars next year and invests in new technologies including artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley is rebooting the relationship.
The most lasting impact of Jobs’s brief convergence with national security, the account suggests, is that it allowed Silicon Valley’s most iconic entrepreneur to make his way back to Apple. The work with spy agencies gave Jobs “another five-year runway to harden and grow the business; to prove himself to shareholders and the market that he was a legitimate business leader, not just a kid who got lucky and could sell,” said Ehring, who left the intelligence world in 1990 to work with Jobs at NeXT. “So, without the NRO enabling Steve’s maturity, he wouldn’t have returned to run Apple as a turnaround CEO.”