Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

avitzur writes with a link to the story behind the Macintosh Graphing Calculator. An excerpt from this strange account: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."

EA?

I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon...

Re:EA?

>I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon...
I was dating a high school math teacher at the time, but, unsurprisingly, the relationship did not survive the events of the story.

Re:EA?

This is - beyond a doubt - the most amazing piece of software I have ever seen. I never knew this gem was sitting quietly on my hard drive.

At first, I was unimpressed. However, as soon as I saw it animate I was blown away. Of course, when I saw the plane intercept of a 3D function animated, I was visibly giddy. :)

I so wish I had this while in my vector calculus course. In fact, I think I might stop by former professor's office when school is back in session and show him.

As soon as your site recovers from this merciless slashdotting, I think I might pick up version 3.

And again, wow. :)

Re:EA?

gotta hand it to you - i think thats the best read i've had here on /. in quite a while. That is a truly great story - one to pass down through the generations. Thanks for sharing the story and your creation!

Re:EA?

Did YOU read the story?

The 2 QA guys volunteered from September to October. Then they were assigned to the project officially in October, as were usability folks (who have a usability lab at their disposal). The story doesn't specify how many QA people were assigned, so maybe it was more than 2.

They also got free prototype hardware to develop on that made their app run 50 times as fast as it did on regular, publicly available hardware.

They shipped in January, so that's 1 month of 2 QA guys' free time, versus 4 months of full time QA, and an unknown amount of usability assistance.

This could certainly be made available to an open source project as well, of course. But don't overlook the big increase in resources that the project got when Apple managers decided to officially support it.

This is the leap that companies need to start making with open source, both in visualizing how it was made, and in investing in it. It isn't always a nights-and-weekends hobby project; sometimes it's a full time project with lots of people being paid to work on it. The fly-by-night image is one that Microsoft really, really wants people to believe, so they can say stuff like "there's no QA" or "there are no real releases" and make people scared to buy anything but Microsoft's incredibly high-quality, bug-free code. *cough*

And this is the kind of zealous insanity

That Microsoft has to compete with?

There will always be an Apple Computer.

Re:And this is the kind of zealous insanity

If you mean in the sense that there will always be an Amiga, then yes.

Re:Sadly, his company now distributes nagware

That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html [pacifict.com]. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html [pacifict.com]

Re:EA?

"I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon..."

Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem around here.

Article Text without silly next buttons

Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

I had many sympathizers. Apple's engineers thought what I was doing was cool. Whenever I gave demos, my colleagues said, "I wish I'd had that when I was in school." Those working on Apple's project to change the microprocessor in its computers to the IBM PowerPC were especially supportive. They thought my software would show off the speed of their new machine. None of them was able to hire me, however, so I worked unofficially, in classic "skunkworks" fashion.

I knew nothing about the PowerPC and had no idea how to modify my software to run on it. One August night, after dinner, two guys showed up to announce that they would camp out in my office until the modification was done. The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code. The work was delicate surgery requiring arcane knowledge of the MacOS, the PowerPC, and my own software. It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.

At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Greg had unlimited energy and a perfectionist's attention to detail. He usually stayed behind closed doors programming all day, while I spent much of my time talking with other engineers. Since I had asked him to help as a personal favor, I had to keep pace with him. Thanks to an uncurtained east-facing window in my bedroom, I woke with the dawn and usually arrived ten minutes before Greg did. He would think I had been working for hours and feel obliged to work late to stay on par. I in turn felt obliged to stay as late as he did. This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.

People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:

Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you're a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who's paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing

Re:Article Text without silly next buttons

Beyond this lies another set of questions, both psychological and political. Was I doing this out of bitterness that my project had been canceled? Was I subversively coopting the resources of a multinational corporation for my own ends? Or was I naive, manipulated by the system into working incredibly hard for its benefit? Was I a loose cannon, driven by arrogance and ego, or was I just devoted to furthering the cause of education?

Or did they do it because they could? One of the things that so many Free Software users overlook as they use the software they didn't pay anything for is that OSS is more than about just getting stuff without paying, it represents the right for someone to write that code. Imagine a world where if you didn't legally work for Apple, you couldn't write a program for their computer. If you weren't a licensed and regulated programmer, you wouldn't be able to develop your own software or develop software for other people.

With signed code initiatives like TCPA/Palladium, that world could be coming to a planet near you soon.

Re:Article Text without silly next buttons

that world could be coming to a planet near you soon
then it's just the pits for mars, isn't it... we should recall the rover as soon as possible.

Re:Article Text without silly next buttons

Uh, you most certainly could buy compilers and tools such as Macintosh Programmers Workshop, ThinkC and ThinkPascal from Symantec, and Codewarrior from Metrowerks. I was exclusively a Mac programmer from 1985 - 1996.

The 'extension' of which you speak is equivalent to the file extensions under dos, like .exe, .txt, .doc, etc. MacOS has meta-data about each file - a 4 digit code identifying the file type, and a 4 digit code identifying the file that created it (which allows for some neat capabilities such as having two files of the same type, but opened by different applications when they are double-clicked on.)

The only reason you had to 'register' an extention with Apple was so other applications could know, for sure, what kind of file an extention represented. There is nothing to stop anyone from using any code they desired, just as there is nothing to stop me from naming a file with an ending like '.dll' under dos/windows... it just isn't a prudent thing to do.

Re:Hehe

You and I can enter into a supplemental agreement on top of copyright: you get the audio I recorded, you pay me $15, you promise not to let anyone else listen to it.

That's where I have an issue with how copyright is enforced. Copyright was written in such a way so that after a given period of time, the work passes into the public domain. DRM effectively prevents that. In my opinion, if you want to require a licence/contract to view your work, then your work should no longer be protected by copyright law. In effect, you should have to choose between contract and copyright protection for your product.

Sheesh..

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

Wouldn't you just know it.. the one place Microsoft has effective security is the place that keeps people from doing something useful.

Dedication

Wow. This story really really amazed me. It made me think of dedication. I can think of people *cough* EA employees *cough* that work those long hours, and that finish a project, but that's because they're forced to... I really wonder if this type of dedication for just the love of the work is existant anymore... I, for one, wish it was a lot more frequent.

- dshaw

Re:Dedication

Phooey.

It is one thing to for a person or three finish a project out of love without expecting a reward. Key words "a project".

It is FAR different for a company to expect that level of work in a non-ceasing manner from their entire dev staff, knowing full well that it destroys mental and social health.

Not to mention the difference in stress level when you're volunteering that level of effort versus being chided in the hopes of squeezing out even more.

I've worked in both situations. One is a suite kind of pain, the other is an intense kind of anguish.

Re:Dedication

Yup you see it everyday... Open Source.

Although there are people that do expect fame/ power from open source, a lot of them do the work because they like to do it. But do not blame EA employees, I would never do such work any any For profit company in my life unless they paid me more.

The first one is giving, the second one is being moronic....

Re:Dedication

Yeah all this guy's dedication is making me feel guilty for posting while being too lazy to even read the story.

Microsoft Security?

"...but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

I hear you can use Internet Explorer and ActiveX to get around any Microsoft security...

Re:Microsoft Security?

Being the only person I know to walk into a Microsoft building and out of same carrying CD-R's stamped "Microsoft Confidential" all over them, without actually being there to do any work for the company, I think I should comment on what MS building security was like.

In order to get into the building, I had to use the phone outside the door to call upstairs to my friend who then came down and let me in. (Five-digit extensions starting with 2.) Or you could just follow somebody in, but watch out, the building I went into has double sets of doors, and you have to swipe your card at both sets. And there's a receptionist inside who had to be distracted...

Once you're in, you're in. If you look vaguely like you belong there, nobody's going to raise a stink. It helps a LOT to wear an old T-shirt and jeans, the standard MS business suit. Wander in and out of offices nobody's in, load up your backpack with cool stuff lying around. Stop by the kitchen and pick up some free soda. (Well they don't have that anymore, I guess...) Play a game of pool or Donkey Kong.

If someone does challenge you, tell them the connector you're writing is driving you insane, and do they want to pop out for Chinese?

And definitely swipe 50 of those "Microsoft Confidential" CD-R's.

Sometime that evening, I notice the building seems a lot dimmer than it was before. When I got outside I noticed Microsoft Security driving around, stopping in front of a building, and pointing some sort of remote control at it. He pushed something, and most of the lights in the building shut off. I STILL want one of those remotes.

I got in my car, drove back across the lake, and hightailed it up I-5 to Canada...

Re:Microsoft Security?

Just setting straight some of your inaccuracies

In order to get into the building, I had to use the phone outside the door to call upstairs to my friend who then came down and let me in. (Five-digit extensions starting with 2)

Internal numbers are accessible via the last 5 digits on an internal phone, but not all (or even most?) start with 2. Or maybe you're trying to get your friend in trouble?

Or you could just follow somebody in, but watch out, the building I went into has double sets of doors, and you have to swipe your card at both sets. And there's a receptionist inside who had to be distracted...

If you tailgated in years ago, that may be true. These days, good luck tailgating if you're not known by the person you're following, even if you have a valid badge. Also, while all buildings have a double set of doors (access to the lobby from outside, and access to the inside from the lobby), the outside doors (into the lobby only) are unlocked during business hours. Good luck distracting the secretary (or more likely, secretaries). You'll need more than one accomplice to do that for you (they're really not busy enough for you to bank on random traffic, and even when they are busy they have a clear view of the doors and will stop you from tailgating), at which point you could just get a valid visitor's pass instead.

Wander in and out of offices nobody's in, load up your backpack with cool stuff lying around.

Cool stuff generally is not just "lying around", unless you want posters and such off of the wall. Everything else is in a locked lab or occupied offices, and in the latter case anything you could easily get away with is personal property. Do you feel good about stealing from people? (ignoring that you're suggesting stealing from a company)

Stop by the kitchen and pick up some free soda. (Well they don't have that anymore, I guess...)

The free sodas are still there.

Play a game of pool or Donkey Kong.

If that's your goal, you need to have good inside sources. Entertainment items vary from building to building and floor to floor. If your heart is set on Donkey Kong, you'll be disappointed to find only Street Fighter 2 if you didn't do your research (and that's not publicly available, or even easily internally available aside from visiting every building).

And definitely swipe 50 of those "Microsoft Confidential" CD-R's.

Which are not sitting out in plain view, if available at all in that building. If it's software available to all internal employees (for example, connection manager software to connect to the VPN from home), you have to get it from the receptionist. If it's for a product group, it's either locked up in the lab or in the group admin's office (or more likely, not available in CD form, but on an internal share you'll not have access to). Either way, don't expect to find piles of booty just laying around.

Sometime that evening, I notice the building seems a lot dimmer than it was before. When I got outside I noticed Microsoft Security driving around, stopping in front of a building, and pointing some sort of remote control at it. He pushed something, and most of the lights in the building shut off. I STILL want one of those remotes.

I've never seen that, but most buildings are on a timer to shut off lights (not power) after a certain time of night. There are internal overrides if you're still working.

I got in my car, drove back across the lake, and hightailed it up I-5 to Canada...

There's a good chance your car would've been towed if you weren't showing a valid parking pass or visitor's parking pass. And if you drove back across the lake to get

Re:Microsoft Security?

Folks, if you've been paying attention, you will notice that an actual Microsoft employee has been "social engineered" into revealing information about the security in the buildings. This guy says "good luck" plenty of times, without realizing that these amazing ninja-turtle secretaries and others would cough up info with less trouble than he has.

Re:Microsoft Security?

an actual Microsoft employee has been "social engineered" into revealing information about the security in the buildings.

He's probably on the ActiveX team and not really used to the concepts of "security" and "secrets".

Re:Microsoft Security?

Isn't it generally agreed that security through obscurity is a bad thing for software? Why should it be any different for physical security?

Working for no pay...

This is guy put the "insane" in "insanely great"

I like this line

"The secret to programming is having smart friends." hahaha

Re:I like this line

"The secret to programming is having smart friends." hahaha

I have to agree with that. I've solved many of my problems by IMing a friend. I might not know how to do X, but PersonA does, and he can shave a few days off of my learning curve by sending me in the right direction when I get stuck.

Sadly, some of my employers have had "no instant messaging" policies.

Heh

The last line of the story:

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

Too bad that security didn't translate to other areas...

Re:Heh

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

I heard that if you issue any sentence longer than 1024 characters to the first guard, he'll obey any command you give after that.

For the second guard, keep shift pressed before he sees you and he won't notice you.

what do EA employees think of this?

Recently there have been a number of slashdot postings related to the conditions of working for EA (can't recall the exact URL, but summary best described as "slave-labour like"). I wonder what those folks think of this level of dedication?

On another note, it was a nice holiday feel-good read for the techno-geek developer. Also inspires me to finish the damn project that I am on right now so that I can "be home for Christmas".

Happy Holidays!

Re:what do EA employees think of this?

But there's a huge difference between working long hours when you want to, and doing it when you're forced to. I worked for a while at Rockwell Automation, and I had one winter where I was working 16 hour days for a month, and I didn't mind because it was my decision to do that so we could help get our guys home from Korea in time for Christmas (they were upgrading the control systems at a steel plant).

Now if I was forced to do that to get some rod mill in PA up and running on short notice because management screwed up and set a poor schedule, I'd be pretty pissed about it, and those hours would get mighty long mighty fast.

These guys wer working out of love (or insanity, you decide). That makes the long hours a lot more palatable...

An engineer's dream

No meetings. No managers. No legal worries. Not having to kowtow to public relations or marketing. Shipping millions of copies of your software.

The only downside was not getting paid, but even that seemed to work out.

Re:An engineer's dream

Sounds like a volunteer, not a slave. Distinction, he's not being forced.

Re:An engineer's dream

> a company that canned me

No. There was a line in the story that got dropped on the editing room floor. I was offered a job as an employee on a new project when the old project was cancelled. I just wasn't interested in the new project. I prefered to be working on educational software.

Re:An engineer's dream

University, huh?

Good job, you will probably get security fired

... my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley ...

Good job, Steve will probably hear about this tomorrow and start firing people working security.

Re:Good job, you will probably get security fired

Ummm, the story being told took place nearly 10 years ago

Re:Good job, you will probably get security fired

Ummm, the story being told took place nearly 10 years ago

Do you really think that little details like that can stop Steve's rage?

Re:Good job, you will probably get security fired

Absolutely -- if Steve had been working there at the time, he would have been designing the calculator himself [folklore.org]!

Programmers: Please note.

Sitting behind a two-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.

Re:Programmers: Please note.

I have this theory that programmers who write software should have to do in person tech support for that demographic for at least a year or so. It really opens your eyes as to what users are actually doing, why they're doing it (if you can get them to be frank with you), what they like, what they don't, what works, and what doesn't.

It makes some decisions about how to do things a whole lot easier...

Re:Programmers: Please note.

I have this theory that programmers who write software should have to do in person tech support for that demographic for at least a year or so.

Years ago when we developed a replacement CRM application for a large telco ISP, we did something unheard of - we integrated the customer service reps into the development process. At first we shadowed them for days to get a feel for how they use the existing application, and interviewed them to see what they liked and disliked. Then we invited at least one rep to every design meeting. During development they were constantly reviewing the work, making sure it was perfect. They almost cried they were so happy.

As an aside: their number one complaint was when they were doing data entry on the very long web form, they constantly had to take their hand off the keyboard, find the cursor, position it over the scroll bar, scroll the page down, then position the cursor over the text field, and resume typing. Tabbing took care of some text field focusing, but wasn't intuitive and predictable enough even when combined with javascript. We broke the data entry into multiple pages with simple navigation. I really miss the old days of character-based terminal applications (so do a lot of end users).

Re:Programmers: Please note.

Years ago when we developed a replacement CRM application for a large telco ISP, we did something unheard of - we integrated the customer service reps into the development process.

Smart companies do custom development by involving the end users in all steps of the process.

Stupid companies off-shore development to somewhere as far away from the end users as possible and think they are saving money by doing so. All they end up doing is shifting the cost from the development group to the end users, often multiplying those costs by an order of magnitude.

Filled with Gems

The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.

classic...

I liked this line the best

I liked this line:

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.

Someone should write a novel about this. ... Come to think of it, this is exactly the sort of thing Chuck Palahniuk would write (author of Fight Club).

Obligatory

The first rule of graphic calculator club...

Wow

Wonderful story. Amazing that this could actually happen.

I don't own a copy of OS X, but is this application still on there?

Re:Wow

>No, the graphing calculator doesn't come with OS X.
It is available for OS X now. You can download the free release from http://www.PacificT.com/FreeStuff.html [pacifict.com] (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect. :)

Can't legally volunteer

You can't legally volunteer to help a for-profit corporation. And for IT staff, there is a minimum amount you have to pay them (well above minimum wage; don't worry).
-russ
p.s. R0ML says that this is why he couldn't get a carrier-grade accounting system turned into open source.

Re:This sounds like a Wired story

I'm too lazy to figure out what my account is, so I guess I'm an anonymous coward, but I worked with Ron at the time, and still hang out with him. The story is true, and NuCalc/Graphing Calculator got started just as he describes. I even have the embroidered NuCalc shirt he gave me as a memento.

Now, should you see anything similar in some upcoming release of some unspecified operating system, check to see whether it's the real deal (Graphing Calculator from PacificT http://www.pacifict.com/Gallery.html [pacifict.com]), or something else.

All too true...

"Sitting behind a two-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices. Humbled after five days of this, Greg and I went back and painstakingly added feedback to the software, as if we were standing next to users, explaining it ourselves."

I really wish more programmers, engineers, and managers understood this.

Re:All too true...

I really wish more programmers, engineers, and managers understood this.

And I wish first time users weren't so flipping clueless ;)

Is this the explanation behind OSX graphing calc?

There's a hidden trick in OSX to get a graphic calculator from the standard one. I never knew why it wasn't there all the time - there's one or two easter eggs in there - and they're all fully functional from what I can tell.

This would explain it nicely, or at least, provide more romantic one than a plain old easter egg.

Re:Is this the explanation behind OSX graphing cal

Feel free to share the hidden trick with the rest of the class :)

Find the Calculator icon in the Finder, and select "Get Info" (or press Command-I after clicking on the calculator). In the plug-ins section, select the "Add" button, and in the resulting file dialog, browser your way to the Calculator -> Contents -> Resources. Select any/all of the *.calcview directories, and press "Choose". Presto -- open the Calculator and select the "View" menu item, and your new plug-in views will be available.

Now for the caveat. Ever since one of the 10.3 updates (10.3.3 maybe?), none of the plug-ins work anymore. But in the event they ever fix this, you now know how to activate different view modes.

I doubt that the graphing capability built into the calculator has anything to do with the Graphing Calculator application, as the one built into the regular Calculator is supposedly 2D only, whereas the Graphing Calculator supports 3D graphs as well.

Yaz.

Ron Avitzur's Demo @ WWDC

Does anyone remember the demo Ron gave at the World Wide Developer's Conference? Was it May 1993...?

Anyway, I remember it was supposed to be a lecture about pen computing, and Apple had Ron come out and show the equation solving interface of the proto-graphing calculator. He threw a bunch o' X and Ys on the screen with some sins and coss for good measure. "Now if you want to solve for X"... and he tapped an X, dragged it to one side of the equals sign, and the equation solved itself.

We were floored. There was this deep silence for a couple of millisenconds and then everyone broke out in thunderous applause. He did more tricks with the equation interface and people hooted and hollered. It was a geek wet dream. After he finished he got a standing ovation and there was a long line of people who wanted to shake his hand.

Good times.

Re:Ron Avitzur's Demo @ WWDC

Yes indeed. This was kinda one of those moments when everybody smacks their collective foreheads and says "Of Course!" "How Cool".

Kinda like the beginning of Quartz at a meeting of engineers when "Engineer X" speaks up and says "you know, instead of using the CPU to render all of this 2-D stuff, we could use the GPU............." This statement was followed by a long pause while the implications of this statement sunk into everybody's wetware (brain) only to be followed by a quiet "sunofa....." by the senior project manager.

Of course Microsoft is busy co-opting this idea which has been shipping now with OS X for a few years but, what else is new?

Re:Ron Avitzur's Demo @ WWDC

Actually Microsoft has a hardware accelerated UI in Windows XP. Read up on GDI+. Also, for newer cards with real programmable GPUs (pretty much Ati 9000, and nVidia FX and up) they use the shaders to accelerate Windows Media playback.

Either way, I'm not so sure the UI acceleration thing was a blinding flash of the obvious, I think it was more hardware needing to get to a certian point. It wasn't until about mid 1999 that a card (TNT2) existed that even had the basic 3d capibility to do what would be needed for a user interface. Even so, at that level, all you could really do was make a window a big texture stretched on a polygon. Neat, but faily useless.

Real useful UI acceleration didn't become feasable until cards became Graphics Processing Units in fact, which means some programability. The GeForce 3, which came about in 2001, was the first consumer level card that could be really considered for that.

So I don't think it was an idea that really had to think in. I remember hearing people musing about using the Voodoos for UI acceleration (and having those more knowledgable tell them why that wouldn't work), I think it was just a matter of the hardware advancing to a point where it was sufficiently useful for things other than playing games.

Bravo! Bravo!

The classic silicon valley hacker/enthusiast vs. big corporate culture. It says alot (in a positive note) on the type of people who worked there and helped these guys along.

I've worked in a big company like Apple in the past and with the right people this just shows how far someone can really go in the most ideal situation. (not really needing a job in the short term)

Good Job Ron!

Red stapler, anyone?

100+ comments, and nobody's yet realized that this guy is Milton from Office Space?

"They fired him, but he doesn't know it. He just comes in every day and works."

(And despite Milton's, ah, interesting character traits, I find him the coolest character in the show; or perhaps it's because of them. So, I mean this in the most praiseworthy manner possible. Rock on!)

Testament to Apple's luster

Apple has so much luster it isn't suprising that people would sneak in to work there for free. More interesting than the fact that they continued to work on company projects after being laid off was that they insisted on doing it in the Apple building rather than in their bedrooms. It doesn't matter what they're doing, just being a part of Apple culture gets people real excited. Not sure whether it's the counterculture, the kind of people Apple hires, or the management style of Steve Jobless. No other company motivates as many people to spend the rest of their lives working for free on its products as Apple.

Golly...

Apple is so cool it has stalkers.

Hire the guy

And why didn't Apple hire the guy after this dedication? I mean he proved that he not only had the dedication, but he also proved effective inter-department communication, team managment, "hiring" skills, and the ability to produce quality. If I were Apple I would have begged him to stay and given him a nice job -- if I didn't reward him financially for the project.

Re:PovRay.

heh. If there are any PovRay developers reading this, send me an e-mail. I'd like to discuss this. It's on the big list of features for future releases. http://www.PacificT.com/TheList.html [pacifict.com]

I love the last line

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security. Never thought I'd ever see "microsoft" and "effective security" in the same sentance

My Best Project was a Skunkworks Job

This story is guaranteed to be very boring for 99% of readers, but it's probably my only chance to tell it where anybody might be remotely interested.

Back in the 80s I was part of an IT group in a manufacturing dept at Tektronix. Our software involved inventory control, tracking batches of work through assembly steps, that sort of thing. One of the computer operators asked if I could help him solve a problem for the stockroom people. Their job was to hand out parts to assembly workers, receive and store the finished subassemblies and hand them out for additional steps until they left the area as finished goods.

All movement of material was tracked by a giant MRP system on an IBM mainframe in another building. The IBM machine generated stacks of PUNCH CARDS which were delivered to our computer room and loaded into our VAX 11/750. As the stockroom people handed out and received material, they had to manually keep track of what they did, noting shortages and errors. Then they entered the information into the 750, which wrote it nightly to a tape that was hand-carried back to the building where the IBM system was.

The stockroom data entry program was very cumbersome to use. It simply did a one-way scroll through the entire inventory -- thousands and thousands of parts and subassemblies -- and allowed the user enter a code on the few items that mattered. To get to an item near the bottom, the clerks had to hit the Page key dozens of times and wait for the slow page refresh in between. Sometimes they would hold the Page key down for a while and go away until it caught up. If they overshot they had to start over because there was no Back function. The stockroom people spent most of their time doing data entry and were consistently several weeks behind, which forced them to come up with various manual ways of keeping track of things. This affected their ability to hand out parts and was starting to have an impact on manufacturing deadlines, and ultimately profits.

In spite of the importance of the situation, the stockroom was low on the IT priority list. So we had a couple clandestine meetings in which the staff told me how the business end of the system worked and the computer operator explained the behind the scenes parts. Working a couple hours a day on the sly for about 2 weeks, I came up with a new data structure and an editor that let the users search for what they wanted and produced various on-screen reports. I also changed the loading procedures to use a tape instead of the stupid cards, and my operator friend persuaded an IBM sysop to bypass the change control process and generate a tape for us instead of cards.

When the users were satisfied with the way everything worked, we put it into production one afternoon as the swing shift person came on duty. In that one shift she cleaned up their entire 3-week backlog of data entry. When the morning people arrived they were speechless. With the extra time they now had, they set about reorganizing their operation and making improvements that they had wanted to do for months.

It was amazing to see what this change did for the morale of these people. Their jobs had been absolutely miserable when they had to work with the old system. They were so happy they brought me a great big apple pie, and were almost in tears giving it to me. Best award I ever got.

Graphing calculator was an insanely great app

I remember getting my first PPC 601 back in '94 and playing around with this. One of the research scientists I worked for came into my office and saw it at work and I showed him what it could graph. We played around with it for a couple of hours and then he went out and ordered new Macintoshes for his research group to replace his aging Sun workstations.

Apple squandered a great opportunity in the 90's. Macs were much faster than many Sun workstations with the kind of work we did (computational fluid dynamics), much cheaper and ran a broader selection of applications. Despite this Apple knew nothing about the scientific market. I remember going to a seminar at MacWorld Boston in 1996 on scientific uses of the Macintosh. None of the presenters talked about how a PowerMac 7500 with a 3rd party 604 accelerator smoked a Sparc 20 for about 33 percent of the price. Instead they talked about how they could use a Mac to model the behavior of a lobster. I felt as if I was in crazy world, here was Apple with this insanely great line of CPUs and they basically ignored a market that would have gone for it lock stock and barrel.

Things have gotten better since then and I have been pleased to see that Apple is targeting bioinformatics applications with the Xserve, but they're going to have a lot of work ahead of them to keep up with Linux's inroads into the market.

This Program Changed My Life

I was struggling through algebra I not long after this program came out (1995). I just wasn't "getting it". I know the phrase is cliched now, but this program was just so *intuitive* that after a few days of fiddling I understood almost all the math I'd ever take right up to 1st semester calculus on a conceptual level.

For me, at least, seeing things in motion (that nifty little value slider) made the concepts just click. Once they were there, the actual mathematical manipulation was much easier, because I was able to visualize "they way this should work out". My teachers were trying to show it on a static chalkboard, and it just wasn't getting through.

I just got my BS in Physics, and without Graphing Calculator, I doubt I'd be where I am today. To the author, if he reads this:

Thank You.

Re:This Program Changed My Life

Thank you! May I quote you on our web site?

Re:This Program Changed My Life

You betcha!

PowerCalc

On a side note, something similar and free already exists for windows:

You can download Powercalc.exe [microsoft.com] from Microsoft's XP PowerToy page [microsoft.com].

These are the programmers I miss.

When I first started getting into computers, these were the types of people I had the chance to learn from. There are too many people that are into IT now that are simply there for the paycheck. They don't care what they are working on, and its just a job. When you are working on a project that is fun, that can take over your life 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, and you enjoy every minute of it. Then your a true techie.

Re:RMS on Hacking and the Graphing Calculator

I have long considered releasing GC under an open source license. While I have total sympathy and support for the open source movement and philosophy, my analysis is a pragmatic one. My goal is to best serve my users, and adopt a strategy to best accomplish that. (I think the events of the story give proof to that.)

Remember that my software's users are primarily high school students or younger.

An open source release would cause the existing revenue stream to vanish, making it impossible to continue to support existing customers or maintain and develop the code base. Pacific Tech has provided free support for its customers and would like to continue to do so, and continue to maintain the product on Mac OS and on Windows. The reason GC is useful is the ease-of-learning and ease-of-use of its user interface. I do not know of a product which demonstrates the open source community's ability to produce excellent user interfaces.

In a high school classroom where any time spent on software is time taken away from teaching, usability is the most important feature of our product. In these respects, open sourcing the code could prove to be a large disservice to our customers.

This is educational software for high school users. There are remarkably few people in high schools, either students or teachers, with both the skills and the time to contribute to open source development. This removes one of the major motivations for open source development - the "I need this tool for myself" reason for working on something.

Furthermore, the reason this software is so useful to schools is not how powerful it is or how many features it has - it is completely unlike the classical monolithic mathematical applications of yore. It is useful due to the restraint in choosing a minimalist feature set and interface to address teachers' and students' needs with elegance. I fear that as an open source project, the incentive structures would lead down the slippery slope of creeping featuritis, which, while it might create something cool for hackers, will do little to help children learn math and like math.

I would like to find a way to have the best of both worlds. Genuinely open and free software, for all that that implies, and the ability to continue to create great software for people that are not programmers, for people that hate math, and know nothing about computers, and to have it installed at the factory, so that it actually reaches the people that need it where it can do some good.

Re:High Praise For Mediocrity

Now if they could only find someone that'd work night and day to invent the 2-button mouse they'd have it made.

Actually there is only one person preventing a multibutton mouse, unfortunately no one outranks him. He won't even allow a build-to-order option when you are ordering online.

Re:High Praise For Mediocrity

Yep, the evil Steve Jobs personally drove up to my door in his Mercedes and threatened physical violence when I bought my Logitech mouse for my G5.

And I'm still suffering from the torture he inflicted when I dared to use the scrollwheel.

I can't imagine what he did to the Mac OS X engineers when he found they'd built full support for multiple buttons and into the OS, or the fact that all their iApps - iTunes, iPhoto - support full functional scrollwheel movements.

Hmm...

Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges. It is impossible to use a Windows machine without a two button mouse and learning context menus. That is not true of Mac OS X.

Re:Score Chart

Great... People doing free work: Apple-1 Linux-Several Million

So what, its not like lots of people or hours translates to quality. Look at shareware in general, look at MS. There is only a very small core of people that have made Linux useful. Few people can read source code, fewer still can write working code at all, fewer still are able to write good code.

Re:Slashdotted already

In this case you have to say "burst into flames."