Strange comment. The comment you're replying to is pointing out that the CIA bought computers for its own use. Am I confused and they also "provided funding" other than buying computers?
Strange comment. The comment you're replying to is pointing out that the CIA bought computers for its own use. Am I confused and they also "provided funding" other than buying computers?
You're reading their comment in isolation. The thread starts with "I assumed something completely different."
You replied to a "still, good to ask in order to seek clarity" type point.
Comment hierarchy is part of the overall context.
Another strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!
There's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it.
The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.
Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts
Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
Sure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.
ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
This is AI. I can see the signature in what it thinks good argument looks like @seizethecheese
The levels of clickbait in that headline are absurd. It's like seventh hell of clickbait.
Also it doesn't come from the source. WSJ headline is: “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA”
So someone's running experiments of some sort on HN, driven by AI, is my read. Hope they snub that shit out.
Welcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay.
At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.