The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave | Hacker News Reader

The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave

nucalc.com

331 pointscavedave32 comments

the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

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(2004), but I gave it an upvote because (a) it is a great story and (b) it has a great quote in it:

It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.

That was an excellent quote.

I also found this to be a great quote: "My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends."

I feel like there should be a "meme museum" or "hacker history" website that catalogs and celebrates all these stories in perpetuity. It seems like a few classic stories pop up on HN, Reddit, et al. every 6-9 months, seemingly discovered anew. I don't think its a bad thing, but it does suggest there isn't an organ that gives a permanent home or chronological history of these important ideas.

folklore.org would be a likely candidate. Currently only Apple but they say the intent is to expand its scope.

DanielBMarkham started that using 'quotefeed' but it didn't really take off.

I've started a project for exactly that. It's not in stealth, as such, but it's in early pre-alpha.

It's ugly, bug-ridden and deeply flawed, but if anyone wants to have a play, email me.

There is something /very interesting/ there. I think organizations work in spite of themselves because people like this are sometimes willing to stand up and fight to do something good/cool outside of their own self-interest.

how do you inspire that? Was it just that apple had a large enough platform that it was worth it to continue developing it for the apple vs. releasing freeware/shareware/open source? was it that apple just hired the right people, people who valued releasing something cool to the world over months of their own time?

It's hard for me to understand just 'cause I'm too mercenary. In their case, I'd release the product freeware/open source/something and figure I'd benefit from the reputation boost. it wouldn't occur to me to push it through as a skunkworks project where it was likely I wouldn't get any credit /or/ money.

From my experience, I think you're right. Corporations move forward b/c of people like that. Everyone else just maintains what the corp has, drives it slightly forward, or drives it backwards. The leaps come from the Nucalc guys.

One of the beautiful things about the Silicon Valley startup industry is that they've restructured the way things work so that those people also reap the fruit of their devotion, and continue to drive it in that direction (ref PG's recent essay on the future of VC).

"It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product."

I've had the good fortune to work for a group of people who are exactly like that. There was an extreme dedication, not because they were forced to, but because they were really addicts in a very real sense. I've personally seen what the last 90 percent could do to a product. It really makes a world of difference. Once you've seen an example, you will immediately adopt the addict mindset and start chasing for that euphoria that comes after you've finally finished the last 90 percent. Once you've done it once, you are likely to do it again, and in the process, lead by example and inspire more addicts.

> For example, at that time only about two hundred PowerPC chips existed in the world. Most of those at Apple were being used by the hardware design engineers. Only a few dozen coveted PowerPC machines were even available in System Software for people working on the operating system. We had two.

Sounds like skunkworks was the only way to go.

There's also a great Google Tech Talk video of the author telling his story: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567...

I remember seeing this in a computer store right after the Power PCs were released. My friend and I spent the next hour or so visualizing equations. It was immediately intuitive and powerful, like a TI calculator on steroids. It was everything a school kid could want and played a huge part in buying one of the machines.

While there are certainly more powerful mathematical software applications available today, It's a shame this type of easy to use application (my friend and I figured it out within 30 seconds) seems very rare.

A version of Graphing Calculator (as Grapher) still ships with every Mac today, so it seems about as available as ever.

I was wondering about that...is Grapher based on the same code base as Graphing Calculator?

No. Grapher is completely different according to the author in the Google Tech Talk video.

God, I love this story, along jwz's story about shipping Mosaic (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html).

Slight nitpick - that story is about shipping what became the Netscape browser. NCSA Mosaic had been out for over a year at that point.

Great story -- inspiring. I've read it several times over the years. But can you imagine what would happen to these guys today (and everyone who had helped them) if the Worldwide Loyalty Team were called in?

Probably nothing. The 'Worldwide Loyalty Team' was at best a hyper exaggerated version of reality, at worst a complete fiction used for page views by Gizmodo. Ask anyone who works at Apple...although perhaps they'll just deny it because they're worried about the Worldwide Loyalty Team ;)

Link to the Gizmodo article about the Worldwide Loyalty Team http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-dow...

Indeed, also, to play devil's advocate:

What if the renegades had been misguided, incompetent programmers who continued to come in to (inadvertently) insert bugs into an ongoing project? One begins to see the point of enforcing physical security policies.

If the rest of your company cooperates with inserting bugs and shit software the way the rest of apple cooperated with these people, physical security is the least of your problems.

> we made everything retroactively legitimate by licensing the software to Apple for distribution

Does it mean that they were eventually getting paid for that successful project?

This is what I left most curious about. There is no mention of compensation that I see - were they eventually appropriately compensated?

It seems strange for them to leave out this detail - but perhaps not since money was clearly not part of their motivations.

This is one of the questions asked at the end of the Google Tech talk video. The author responds that they licensed it to apple for a nominal fee. He also says that he got paid pretty well as a contractor for apple so didn't feel bad not getting paid for a few months. He also apparently still works full time on this program and spoke passionately about upgrading it to take advantage of GPUs.

Like many others have said, an oldie but a goodie. When I was TAing the Intro to CS class in college, I sent this out to the class as "extra reading" though it was only marginally related to what the professor was talking about (pair programming, I think). It was such a great story that I couldn't pass up the opportunity for people to read about how cool and passionate programmers can be.

This reminds me of what Clay Shirky talks about in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age". It's the difference between intrinsic motivations and extrinsic (generally financially related) motivations. These guys wanted it to work, and operated with the earnestness of a startup. That passion is powerful stuff.

An oldie but a goodie. It keeps showing up periodically on Progit and other developer sites, and I keep rereading and upvoting it every time.

Great story. Also, it includes a link to commentary on Appleturns.com. IMHO, 'As the Apple Turns' was the greatest Apple website out there. I still miss it dearly.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050219104130/http://www.appletu...

"..Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work."

This.

Sort of like the forgotten employee story reversed.

love this story :)

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