The Graphing Calculator Story (2004)

At Apple? Campus security would probably have a discussion with you if you stayed on their premises for too long without a badge.

It's interesting. Historically there have always been these sort of back channel, side channel, unofficial ways of doing all sorts of things, some of them basically critical to the operation of a functional society. Yet as society has become more developed we tend to formalize the "official" ways of doing things while pretending that everything else was irrelevant (or, worse, harmful). And then life becomes more restricted with less room for imagination and exploration, with obvious negative consequences for innovation, among many other things. It may not be possible to maintain all of the unofficial side channels and so forth as things advance but it's critical that people think about them and be thoughtful about how to replace them.

We were trying to build an iPad with 1992 technology. http://arno.org/arnotify/2010/01/penmac/

If it was an official decision to ship a calculator app, would it have been made as impressive as this one?

I wonder, because the passion required to ship this impressive app is only there perhaps, due to the nature of the people doing it, and not due to any management oversight.

It's the world before the World Wide Web actually lived up to its name. At the time, they were entirely correct that getting their software pre-installed on Macs was the only way they could get it in the hands of most school users.

The PPC was introduced in 1994. The only way normal people downloaded software was via AOL, Compuserve, etc.

I was able to call into a free BBS run by the University of Georgia that ran a gopher server. Some way, I was able to telnet to Nyx and get a free shell account I could use to get to ftp freeware sites, but most people couldn't do that.

Open source existed, but wasn't as easy to distribute as it is now. I'm also not sure that the education-model Macs would've had a development environment installed to assemble the source (if the Macs I used in the mid-90s at school had software development tools, I was never aware of them, anyhow). And I'm not sure what the options would've looked like for acquiring an open-source set of dev tools for the Mac anyhow (especially considering that Power was a new, still rare hardware architecture at the time).

Thank you!