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."

I like this line

[iosmart]

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

An engineer's dream

[silentbozo]

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:Article Text without silly next buttons

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Score Chart

[zmilo]

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

Programmers: Please note.

[martinX]

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:Dedication

[Jahf]

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

[badriram]

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:Score Chart

[AHumbleOpinion]

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:what do EA employees think of this?

[Fahrenheit 450]

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...

All too true...

[stubear]

"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:An engineer's dream

[jsgates]

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

Re:Dedication

[raindog_mx]

Hey this guy had no family to support and he could live from his savings. I have a family and even tough I'd love to have a job as rewarding as that one, my savings wouldn't last more than a month. That guy should be praised as he excersiced his choice to do a somewhat heroic task yet he always had the right to be paid for what he did. The story doesn't say so but in the end I believe he should have got more than smart friends and seller badges from his project, and that's ok for me.

Re:High Praise For Mediocrity

[michaeldot]

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.

motivation same as OSS

[aoe2bug]

to me, it seems that many of the same things that motivated this (these?) guy(s) are the same as the motivation for being an Open Source Programmer. Just my .02

Re:I like this line

[KillerCow]

"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.

Re:what do EA employees think of this?

[happyhippy]

Its one thing making software that you think will benefit people, its another making a generic shitty brand game that'll benefit no one.

Re:An engineer's dream

[tomstdenis]

I think you missed the part where he said he had money to burn.

If you have debt/family/etc to pay down then free work doesn't make sense. But if you've saved up enough to live a year or two without working I don't see the harm.

Tom

Re:motivation same as OSS

[AHumbleOpinion]

to me, it seems that many of the same things that motivated this (these?) guy(s) are the same as the motivation for being an Open Source Programmer. Just my .02

You think there is something new about writing code for free and sharing it with others? It predates "open source", it predates Linux, it predates GNU, ... The only thing different nowadays is that more people have computers and that communication and distribution is much easier. Well that and religious/political overtones about all of this.

In other news, your (and my) generation did not invent sex. ;-)

Re:I like this line

[MikeFM]

Isn't that really the key to success in all parts of life? It's not what you know, it's who you know. If you know the right people and they like you well enough to do favors for you then you'll likely be a success.

Opensource plays this card a lot. One of the best ways to earn favors is by giving favors. If you write some cool code and give it away then people who use it will often be willing to return favors of one kind or another back to you. The fact that copying is easy in the digital age, the horror of Micrsoft, the MPAA, and the RIAA, makes it easy to pass favors out. Pass them out in mass and you can get massive favors returned. The concept of a gift economy is really that easy.

Testament to Apple's luster

[heroine]

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.

Re:EA?

[caino59]

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!

Hire the guy

[utlemming]

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.

PovRay.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at pacifict [pacifict.com] it looks like you could just slap a front end on povray.

Re:what do EA employees think of this?

[JabberWokky]

If he was a slave, who was his master?

I submit that all free men can make their own choices. That includes working on an educational tool because you want to see it shipped, fully recognizing the possibility of failure (and indeed with trespassing charges, jail time).

He did this of his own will. If you don't understand that, you will never understand greatness; most great men and women have pushed like this in their fields of art, science, industry and technology.

--
Evan

Re:The real story

[Ageless]

He didn't do the work for a corporate entity. He did the work for himself, and his users. He got his software on millions on machines, which to many programmers is the best pay you can receive.

Re:Programmers: Please note.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Well, two big reasons for that

[Sycraft-fu]

1) They are doing it because they want to. If someone wants to work on a project, I don't feel bad about asking them to do more work on it. They can always say no. However if they like working on it, and think my idea is a good one, maybe I'll get what I want.

2) Many of them like to trumpet their software as better than closed source. K, great, but it'd better be good then and part of that is fixes and updates. Firefox is a good browser, however if they decide they don't need to patch it, and it gets security holes that go unfixed, it won't be a good one any longer.

Number two is actually the one that gets many OSS projects in trouble. They want to claim OSS is a superior model, and that the software that OSS produces is better than commercial. However they also want to hide under the "It's free, no gaurentees, fix it yourself" flag. Well, you can't have it both ways.

Re:Well, two big reasons for that

[cbr2702]

They want to claim OSS is a superior model, and that the software that OSS produces is better than commercial. However they also want to hide under the "It's free, no gaurentees, fix it yourself" flag. Well, you can't have it both ways

Yes you can. OSS is a better model that usually puts out better software in the end. But part of that approach is a stage where the software is not yet done and still needs testing, bug fixes, and features. And sometimes it is not clear where in the process a given project is.

A good novel

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly the same thing but if you haven't read "The Cuckoos Egg" it's well worth the read. Excellent early story of a Berkley Astronomer tracking a hacker. All for stealing a around a dollar worth of computer time. A lot of fun.

Re:Score Chart

[Anonymous Coward]

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

And still no graphing calculator for Linux of anywhere near the quality of Apple's.

Hmm...

Re:An engineer's nightmare

[cheekyboy]

Whats worse is seeing a project that IS making money and is NOT a redink sink being cancelled, even though it was making $2m a year in revenue out of 2.5 programmers fulltime. But we know how NASDAQ corporates like to inflate development costs by counting the managers time, the marketing staff, the HR and insurance rates etc... all up to about 120k/person even though the end person only gets 80k.

So typical company cancels the product while it is selling, and at the same time invests 100m+ into take overs that wont see a positive ROI for at least 3-4 years down the track, even with 30m in sales per year.

Damn politics and suck up managers.

Also seeing the company spend $45m per quarter on sales/marketing vs $15m per quarter on R&D is very sad too, considering that the sales/marketing staff get FREE "junkets" and meetings in great places like hawaii and paid for.

Are the engineers considered the 'farm workers' of the 21st century?

Re:Well, two big reasons for that

[symbolic]

"It's free, no gaurentees, fix it yourself" flag.

How recently have you read the EULA on most commercial software products?

What bugs are fixed, and under what kind of time frame? Who decides? You? No way. You are subject to THEIR priorities, which means that some bugs may be overlooked entirely, merely because the ROI isn't high enough.

You may not have the expertise to fix the bugs yourself, but I know from my own experience, we had a problem with a commercial software package whose recent upgrade not only introduced a serious bug that affected our workflow, but we were powerless to do much about it. At least with OSS,we could have considered the option of hiring a programmer to make the necessary changes.

Re:EA?

[websaber]

So this is what people did with their time before there was open source. Donate it to individual companies. Now let's say that back then the same work was done open source not only would of it been on more platforms and millions of more machines but it also might of been expanded to something even cooler. Same Pay. Same coolness. Better recognition. Maybe even a job offer somewhere.

Re:Article Text without silly next buttons

[l3pYr]

...those of us that use Free Sofware exclusively...
Read: Leeches

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

These are the programmers I miss.

[blanks]

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:Microsoft Security?

[gatekeep]

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

Re:EA?

[JamieF]

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*

Here's the secret

[Inthewire]

Sales brings money in.

Everyfucking thing a company does happens because there is money.

The company is a device to put money in the pockets of those who own / fund / control it.
The company doesn't exist to employ you.
The company doesn't exist to invent things.
The company doesn't exist to further the state of the art.
The company exists to enrich the people who own / fund / control it.

Welcome to Earth.
Feel free to convey the lesson to your home planet.