Ex-Apple Engineer Would Sneak Into Apple To Finish Calculator App
You know there is a special breed of people who believe in something that they are doing so much that nothing, and I mean, nothing will stop them from completing their vision.
Case in point – Ron Avitzur.
You see Ron worked for Apple as a contractor and was part of the team responsible for working on a graphing calculator that was slated to be shipped with the new PowerPC in 1994. However Apple decided at some point to scrap the project and offered Avitzur a place elsewhere in the company but he declined because he only liked working on projects that he had a passion.
Like a graphing calculator.
Avitzur was more than confident that the project was well worth it regardless of Apple’s cancellation of the project, so much so that he began working on a plan to continue working on it. The first loophole he found was when he was told to hand in an invoice for his time. He realized that as long as he held off handing it in he could keep his ID card and access to Apple.
So Avitzur continued going in to work each day and working on the project and he even managed to find some like minded people to help him.
His mistake came though when he mistakenly mentioned what he was doing to a manager he thought he could trust. The manager promptly cancelled his access card which made Avitzur go to Plan B – sneaking into Apple to work on his project; which he managed to do with the help of friends.
Avitzur finally finished his graphing calculator and then with his friends showed it to a team of Apple managers in a demo that amazingly went perfect.
This is why you saw a graphing calculator when it shipped with the PowerPC and found its way on to 20 million machines.
If you want to read the full story behind this awesomeness head over here.
via Slashgear
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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