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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."
>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.
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.
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.
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
Just setting straight some of your inaccuracies
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?
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.
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)
The free sodas are still there.
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).
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.
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.
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 to I5, you wasted a whole lot of time sitting in traffic on the floating bridges (I90, SR520). If Canada is the goal, better to take I405 up around the lake and meet I5 there.
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
Thank you! May I quote you on our web site?