Classic story

Thanks for sharing this great story. I’m not a math guy, but I loved plugging things into app and making beautiful graphs. I had no idea about what a weird backstory it had.

If you ever want a great collection of more fun stories from early Apple days, check out folklore.org. It’s earlier than this stuff, but covers a lot of shennanigans.

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.

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.

They created a pretty handy app that was bundled with the base OS, and which I remember having fun using. So it’s probably just as well that Apple didn’t hassle them. But in all seriousness, that’s not the most amazing building security ever.

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Hah!

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.