NeXT and the US government

[Rhetorica]

A new article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) discusses NeXT's relationship with "The Company": The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA (archive.is link). This is a decent overview of how taking on the CIA as a customer was instrumental to NeXT's profitability, though as the title implies—like all modern articles on the subject—it's framed mainly in hindsight from the perspective of what all this means for the modern Apple Computer.

Still, it does a remarkable job of not mentioning Apple twice per paragraph, unlike many YouTubers attempting to cover the same subject. Even more remarkably—to my pedant's eye—it correctly refers to the operating system as "NEXTSTEP," which not even Apple's documentation can do reliably these days (newer introductory material erroneously uses the older form, "NeXTSTEP," presumably evidence of a break in the oral transmission of corporate culture.)

With that in mind, I thought it was high time we actually gathered together all of the source material on the broader subject of NeXT and how it fit into the broader narrative of tech companies competing for US federal government procurement contracts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the innovations and standards that came out of this time period were directly influenced by US federal recommendations—for example, one NASA document explicitly rules out buying NeXT hardware in favor of mainstream Unix stacks because of a lack of Motif and X11 support.

[ZombiePhysicist]

As alluded to here

https://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php?msg=180

Folks may speculate that NeXT sold a good bit more than the 50k units they sold. What's important to note was at the time, the dsp and ability to do on the fly ocr on the machine, as well as its ability to record telephony, it was an ideal platform to build something like echelon.

Early text to speech also was available. Capturing Fax, voice, digital information all in one spot and index it all with tools akin to digital librarian.  The rapid dev environment made it unique platform at the time for that project.