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."

Comments

EA?

[danielacroft]

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

Re:EA?

[avitzur]

>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?

[DarkAurora]

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. :)

Microsoft Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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?

[IO ERROR]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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.

Re:Microsoft Security?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

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.

Heh

[daveschroeder]

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

[binkzz]

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.

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:An engineer's dream

[avitzur]

> 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:Good job, you will probably get security fired

[justforaday]

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

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.

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.

I liked this line the best

[goon america]

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).

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:Wow

[avitzur]

>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 (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect. :)

Ron Avitzur's Demo @ WWDC

[poena.dare]

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: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.

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.

Obligatory

[Have Blue]

The first rule of graphic calculator club...

I love the last line

[bossesjoe]

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

Re:PovRay.

[avitzur]

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

Re:This sounds like a Wired story

[Anonymous Coward]

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), or something else.

My Best Project was a Skunkworks Job

[serutan]

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.

Sheesh..

[Kwil]

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.

Re:This Program Changed My Life

[avitzur]

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

Re:Sadly, his company now distributes nagware

[avitzur]

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. 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