A few weeks ago I decided to do some digging into the famous story that the NeXT factory ran for a whole month in late 1992 or early 1993 producing spare parts and replacement hardware to fulfill the needs of government customers. Using the MarCom CD that Andreas gave us (link here (http://cdrom.nextcommunity.net/new/Marcom%20Sales%20Tools.7z))—which was labeled as "Maroon Sales Tools" by his autocorrect but seems to actually be an internal NeXT Marketing Communications resource!—I was able to confirm that the NSA was indeed the leading customer within the US federal government.
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One particular curiosity is that all of these sales were apparently enabled by NeXT starting to produce "Tempest NeXTstation Color" units, which is not a piece of jargon that appears in typical marketing publications:
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Of course, if you've been around for any amount of time at all, you'll recognize that TEMPEST is the name of an eavesdropping technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)) identified by Bell during World War II caused by electromagnetic leakage from high-voltage wires—basically, if you put a sympathetically-tuned piece of wire in the right spot, it can pick up a signal from the terminal next door. In some cases this was so bad that the emissions from a CRT's electron gun could be used to spy on the contents of a video terminal. By synecdoche, the keyword "TEMPEST" became the name of a specification for equipment that was shielded to prevent these attacks.
This snippet from NeXTWORLD (Jan 22 1992) confirms that "Tempest" was indeed referring to the certification:
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Unfortunately the actual Government Computer News article is quite tricky to find; I think the University of Saskatoon has a paywalled copy of the issue in question, but otherwise it's pretty scarce.
I know there are a lot of NeXT machines out there that are badged as US government surplus. Has anyone ever seen one of these 20" Hetra monitors? Do they look anything like NeXT monitors or are they totally different?
What a great bit of computer history archeology!
One thing to note that there is such a thing as "intelligence/military agency accounting" where the amount stated is often incomplete and a bit of an iceberg regarding the public amount stated versus the amounts actually transacted.
This is often the case for obvious security reasons so adversarial forces cannot rely on published amounts to estimate US assets.
Any Americans who could do a FOIA (Freedom of Information Request)? Surely they could release that information after 30 years?
Quote from: Rhetorica on Oct 13, 2025, 11:40 PMUnfortunately the actual Government Computer News article is quite tricky to find; I think the University of Saskatoon has a paywalled copy of the issue in question, but otherwise it's pretty scarce.
Good find Rhetorica.
I couldn't find anything :/
https://web.archive.org/web/20011009030529/http://www.gcn.com/archives/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20011009030529/http://www.gcn.com/archives/)
EDIT: (18/October/2025) Just did a search for
Nextstep on https://www.theblackvault.com and all I could find was this NRO document https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/spysatellites/F09-0133.pdf which mentions a
Nextstep users forum at Westfield - 21 May 1996. I thought I would search that site as he is always requesting information from government agencies.
That's pretty cool. I wonder if any of those Tempest Nextstations survived.