The CIA saved Steve Jobs - and history is in your pocket
The strange connection we didn't know happened: In 1986, CIA officials approached Steve Jobs with a secret deal that gave NeXT, the company he owned, critical financial oxygen - and helped pave the way for his comeback at Apple and the system from which the iPhone grew.
In 1986, at the height of the Cold War, CIA agents appeared without prior notice at the headquarters of Steve Jobs' new company, "NeXT". Jobs, who had been ousted from Apple a year earlier, found himself at the center of the American intelligence agency's classified "Program B", which dealt with the development of spy satellites.
Apparently, the connection between Jobs, a flower child who practiced Buddhism and saw LSD as a formative experience, and the closed intelligence community seems detached from reality. However, as reported in the "Wall Street Journal", the mutual interest outweighed the cultural gaps and gave birth to a dramatic collaboration that shaped the future of technology.
The connection was formed after Jobs purchased George Lucas's graphics division (later "Pixar"), which developed computers for a defense company that worked with intelligence. Joe Romello, a CIA man, met with Jobs and offered a classified deal: the purchase of 20,000 NeXT workstations. Jobs refused to be exposed to classified details, claiming he "would not remember to forget them", but approved the sale. The agency upgraded the computers independently with fast chips from the "Motorola" company and graphics cards from "Intel".
For NeXT, this secret deal was a critical lifeline. The company suffered from financial difficulties and poor sales in academia. The new computers were transported in secret trucks to classified facilities of the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). There, they were used by intelligence analysts to scan high-resolution satellite images and share data on a global network, a kind of early military internet that preceded the civilian internet.
According to the report, the impact of the deal extends far beyond the borders of the Cold War. The contract with the intelligence agencies gave NeXT five years of financial breathing room, and allowed Jobs to mature as a CEO and stabilize his business status. In 1996, Apple acquired NeXT, and Jobs made his historic comeback to the company.
The NeXT operating system, developed and partially funded thanks to those same black intelligence budgets, later became the foundation upon which the operating systems of the Mac computers and the iPhones of us all were built. The true legacy of the short meeting between Jobs and the world of espionage is the simple fact: without the orders from the CIA, it is possible that the most iconic entrepreneur of Silicon Valley would never have found his way back to the top.
