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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."
"The secret to programming is having smart friends." hahaha
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.
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.
Great... People doing free work: Apple-1 Linux-Several Million
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.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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....
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...
-30-
"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.
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.
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.
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
-Dan
Its one thing making software that you think will benefit people, its another making a generic shitty brand game that'll benefit no one.
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.
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!
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.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Looking at pacifict it looks like you could just slap a front end on povray.
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
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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.
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.
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?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
...those of us that use Free Sofware exclusively...
Read: Leeches
RTFA and cite your sources or prepare to get pwnd
DRM is incompatible with fair use. Its *MY* computer, if I want to copy some audio I legally purchsed the right to listen to into an MP3 format to play on my portable player I have *EVERY* right to do so, and the producer of that audio has no legal right to prohibit me from doing so, so they are chasing a technical ability to do so with DRM.
You are wrong. They have the ability to ask you to abide by additional rules. 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 one example. Perfectly legal, perfectly acceptable, been doing it for 100 years.
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.
TruePunk | Games
Isn't it generally agreed that security through obscurity is a bad thing for software? Why should it be any different for physical security?
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*
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.
Writers imply. Readers infer.