According to a report by Sharon Weinberger in The Wall Street Journal, the CIA quietly became an important customer for NeXT in the late 1980s, buying thousands of specially configured workstations at a time when Jobs’ company badly needed sales. The arrangement, the report argues, helped keep NeXT afloat and gave Jobs several more years to develop as a business leader before Apple brought him back in 1996. The relationship began in 1986, when CIA officials Joe Romello and Jeff Harris...
