This story is almost too cool to be true. A contractor working for Apple in the early 90s developed a graphing calculator application that took full advantage of the new PowerPC processor, but his project was cancelled while the software was in its early stages. He was out of a job, but his ID badge still worked. So he kept coming back to work, at no pay, for months, hiding from management, to finish the job, and dozens of Apple employees pitched in to help. In 1994, his app, “Graphing Calculator,” shipped with the OS.
Guess Apple doesn’t only have a fanatical user base, they’ve got fanatical engineers as well 🙂 Cool.
Graphic Calculator still is one of the coolest, most useful apps I’ve ever used. After missing it sorely on OS X, I’m glad to know that it’s available for download.
His ID badge did not work.
My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
“He was out of a job, but his ID badge still worked. So he kept coming back to work, at no pay, for months, hiding from management, to finish the job, and dozens of Apple employees pitched in to help.”
Guess I know why they’re called “the good old days”. You’re not going to see as much of that these days, unfortunately.
Some employers now expect this king of behavior nut I need to be paid to live!
If you love your work, and you’re working on something cool, nothing will stop you. Even layoffs. This story is a ray of a sun in a corporate days, there’s still some guys and gals who are passioned about their work.
Some of people who just like to work, because they have intresting job or it goes with his/hers hobby. They are called rats, and told that this is a rat race. It’s not true, and people who says so, are clueless how exciting is to create things. Watch as they become better.
I don’t work for paychecks only. Working just to pay my bills, to get food, to eat, to work, to get paycheck, to pay my bills — nonsense.
Old Slashdot story.
Not all of us are reading /., I’d rather go on walk, than reading flamewars by idiots (notice: not all /. readers are idiots, but they have quite big amount of’em there;-))
Wow. It looks like this story was mentioned on slashdot. And it *is* old. the 21st of December. Ancient history. Sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Gates.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/22/0146243
(there’s no pleasing some people)
It is an old story for Slashdot they post far more news topics on a day than OS News.
Charging $100 for it is way off…i think he is trying to pay back his debts.
ps.
Why not have posted the article about paint.NET seems very promosing.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/22/1620248&tid=…
Totally agreed
I feel very priveleged to be able to work on my greatest hobby for a living!
over at /. there is a rating of posts & replys starting at -1 (troll/off_topic) that goes up to +5 (insightful,informative) so by adjusting the threshold you can filter out undesirable posts/comments…
depending on how many posts/replys & comments and my personal interest on any given topic i adjust the threshold to suit my needs greatly improving the readability…
From the article, “Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive”
That reminded me of an article I’d read recently about the merits of meetings.
(http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2057011)
A few gems from it are:-
1. Meetings do not do what it says on the tin. Consultative meetings don’t consult. Management meetings don’t manage, team meetings lead to fights and union meetings decide to send motions on Afghanistan to anyone who’ll have them. So why do we see them as a panacea? And if we scrap them, how will we regulate our affairs? Quite a problem. I think it calls for a royal commission.
2. Sitting at your desk alone, gazing into space and twiddling your thumbs will get you sacked if the CCTV camera swings your way. Doing the same thing in a meeting is perfectly acceptable, as people will assume you are contemplating the points made so eloquently by the last speaker. At very least your body language will indicate that you are interacting socially and thus contributing to the general weal. This impression fades, however, if you are slumped across the table with your head on your arms, fast asleep.
Great story! I enjoyed reading it. It’s pretty cool to read about people that are so passionate about their dreams and goals and that it doesn’t revolve around the $$$. As an engineer I can relate to the corporate muck and politics that keep really cool things from happening sometimes. In my business, it seems that everyone is out for themselves and trying only to advance their careers. Screwing anyone in the way, and not giving a *crap* about the actual product their supposed to be making.
Not only did this story have many points of hilariousness, but it spoke of the man’s actual work ethic & integrity;
“I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it.”
Granted he didn’t have a family or mortgage and survived on his savings. But that was one heck of a stunt to attempt, let alone pull off!
I’ll tip my hat……
A lot of people who commented obviously didn’t read this sentence:
Since I had neither a mortgage nor a family, I could afford to live off savings.
Please try to remember that there is a vast difference between being willing to do something for free and being able to do something for free, esp with something as involved as this. Just cuz someone isn’t able, doesn’t mean that person isn’t willing.
The story is inspiring, but thinking that passion alone will cut it is simply naive, it also depends on the ability & the right circumstances (which were both present in this case). Passion alone doesn’t pay bills, unfortunately. If you don’t have bills to pay, passion will get you a lot further obviously.
>>The story is inspiring, but thinking that passion alone will cut it is simply naive, it also depends on the ability & the right circumstances (which were both present in this case). Passion alone doesn’t pay bills, unfortunately. If you don’t have bills to pay, passion will get you a lot further obviously.<<
Does that mean if we get rid of money, and work for passion of our job, and the desire to care for others, that we will progress farther, Faster?
Seems like the utopia that no-one can realize because they can’t get rid of greed(whether money or materialistic).
Does that mean if we get rid of money, and work for passion of our job, and the desire to care for others, that we will progress farther, Faster?
I was not referring to some sort of mythical utopia, merely about the additional necessity for the right circumstances besides passion to satisfy the ‘being able to’ condition.
It demonstrated how much Apple opposed the code optimization for PPC. In other words Apple was quite happy selling you a PPC chip to run a 68K OS in emulation mode.
This shed new light in that dark period for Apple. I hope they change their ways and make OsX truly 64bit.
Now adays is a repeat of sorts, granted not identical circumstances, but the fact remain that Apple is actively selling a 64bit hardware with a 32bit OS.
Like before, on the PPC initial era, the hardware is great but the software was crappy. People were sold then and now and under-utilized piece of hardware.
Yes early in the story he mentions that his ID badge still worked, however, later in the anecdote he mentions that it had stopped working, or implied that it had. (He mentioned having to loiter around doors, etc. to get in IIRC…)
The most ironic part of this story is that Apple allowed him to keep graphing calculator as his own product, but a few years(? months?) ago didn’t Apple sue some ex-employee(s?) for some piece of software that Apple claimed that the ex-employee wrote while working for Apple? (I seem to vaguely recall this, but I am FAR too lazy to go google for it, for a osnews comment.)
/. seems to get worse and worse every year. I will say that the trend of stories first appearing on OS News and THEN finding their way to /. seems to have been reversed in the last couple of months…
IIRC though this story was even in the mainstream press first, as were several other articles at /. then here. Kind of weird, as usually they pick it up several weeks later…
(At one time, and still, occassionally /. did have useful comments, its just that in recent years it has significantly deteriorated. The moderation system never really worked no matter how they tried to modify it once they got to be pretty big…since say 2001 or so.)
Sadly, you, like the editor, just skimmed through the great article. The story would not be so cool if “his ID badge still worked” throughout the months.
(in Sept)
“She called Security, had them cancel our badges, and told us in no uncertain terms to leave the premises.”
“…started sneaking into the building every day, waiting out in front for real employees to arrive and casually tailgating them through the door. Lots of people knew us and no one asked questions, since we wore our old badges as decoys.”
(in Oct)
“We got badges the next day. They were orange Vendor badges, the same kind the people working in the cafeteria, watering the plants, and fixing the photocopy machines had.”
Wow, what a real inspiring story… and I mean that truly. As a full time student (and I mean full time… the university has me down as 1.6 students) I don’t have too much free time (and what time I do have I use to earn spare change by tutoring school kids), and I don’t have the finances (I live off my student loan… just enough to pay the bills each week) to do something like that, but it’s always in my dreams… I don’t mean anything like that exactly but to go off and be able to work and complete such a big project like that. That’s part of the real entreprenual (spelling?) spirit, which is what I think every economy needs (and sadly not every economy gets).
Anyway, that was just a few things I really wanted to get off my chest.
btw, what does IIRC stand for?
lol, just noticed that the font is the same for the comments posts, the name, email and subjects boxes for new posts, but the comment box for new comments is in a different font.
Apple allowed him to keep graphing calculator as his own product, but a few years(? months?) ago didn’t Apple sue some ex-employee(s?) for some piece of software that Apple claimed that the ex-employee wrote while working for Apple?
Ah, but this guy wasn’t working for Apple at the time. He’d been laid off, remember? As such, he developed the product on his own time (albeit on Apple’s property) but not as an employee, thus the rights to it were his. Apple legal probably figured this out pretty fast.
Oh, and “IIRC” = “if I recall correctly”.
Ruahine writes: As a full time student (and I mean full time… the university has me down as 1.6 students) I don’t have too much free time.
If you think you don’t have any free time now, just wait until later. Now — and the first couple of years after school — are about the most free time you’ll have. It’s a good time to learn all you can, whether in formal classes, or creating your own pet projects. That’s when you’ll really see what you don’t yet know.
that is freaking awesome. im lost for words at this point..
I don’t know how many times we’re going to have to tell you this, but do please try and get it through your head this time: unless you’re running applications which need to access more than 2GB of memory, a 64-bit version of OS X would be exactly 0% faster than the 32-bit version you’re running right now, on a G5 processor. A G5 running 32-bit code is NOT, as you asserted in another thread, a G4 emulator. It’s a G5. Just deal with it already.
Actually for pure 32 bit apps it even could be that a move to 64 bit causes a slow down….
It bloats the code a little bit for sure.
Add to that that there still are various awfulnesses in legacy code which rely on skipping over variable boundaries to achive a null or negative result and you can see that a full move to 64 bit in the short term is questionable.
What you need is
a) full access to the 64 bit memory
b) full access to the new commands
c) the core libs maybe moved to 64 bit and then one lib to the next.
Heck other operating systems still have lots of 16 bit and some 8 bit code in them and still live happily on (Windows for instance still has some dlls running in the old 16 bit segments, and there the move was much more than going from 16 to 32 bit, it was basically ditching the segementation for a full flat model, with totally different ways to access the memory.
Currently there is lots of hype about 64 bit, but 64 bit alone is kindof pointless, currently, unless you need more than 4 gigs of ram, the features many of the new 64 bit architectures add to the old cores are not pointless howver, but they have nothing to do with 64 bit on many cases.
x86-64 adds at least 7 new general purpose registers, several more SSE registers, which is a speed boost as the general x86 architecture has been starved of registers for years.
Cool story though
At least we know who to blame if we have to work unpaid overtime
A 64-bit bus allows the double of data being transfer per transfer to the memory, in comparison to a 32-bit bus.
That’s hardly a slowdown.