While listening to the third episode of Chris Parrish & Brent Simmons’ podcast the record, in which the pair interviews Greg Robbins the Mac OS Drag Manager and Objective-C library for Google Data APIs, I noticed this in the show notes:
Greg Robbins is Graphing Calculator co-author (a story you should already know about, that we don’t go over again)…
Turns out, I hadn’t read or even heard of the story behind Graphic Calculator. Turns out, it is a crazy one:
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, 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.
The whole story is amazing. It’s well worth the read.