Rogue Software Development
Posted by Scott Hughes Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:33:00 GMT
I happened upon this amazing story (via Wired). The incredible Graphing Calculator application, which is included with Macintosh computers, was actually a clandestine, rogue project at Apple. A contractor, whose project was cancelled, continued to sneak into the building and work on the application.
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. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
Thanks to all his hard work, Graphing Calculator was bundled in with the OS and was initially shipped on more than 20 million machines. That’s a pretty good sized audience.
When we had a test Mac at my first co-op job, I wasted a few hours playing around with Graphing Calculator. It was almost enough to make me ‘switch’ back then… Though, college students who are paying their own way through college have a hard time affording a Mac (until the Mac Mini anyways). Wondering why he didn’t ship a version of it with Windows?
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
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