The State - News from Aug. 22, 1989

The U.S. Air Force announced it is buying at least 10,000 Macintosh computers for its worldwide military command and control system, Apple Computer’s biggest federal sale to date. The sale puts Macs in military operations on a large scale for the first time, shattering the Cupertino-based company’s longtime reputation for 1970s-style pacifism. “It is designed to send out the fighters, dispatch ships and tell the Marines to hit the beaches,” said Bob Brewin, a senior writer at Federal Computer Week who has studied the system. “It doesn’t sound like the old Apple.” The sale to the Air Force is part of a major overhaul of the military’s system for controlling operations at about 40 military stations around the globe. The new computers will be hooked to larger systems and used for everything from word processing to electronic mail of battle plans.