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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."
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.
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....
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.
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-
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.
"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.
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.