A few years ago I discovered that there is a little program hiding in Mac OS called Graphing Calculator. It was very helpful for year 12 maths, and it's recently come in handy for statistics at uni.

I just read a fascinating article about how it came to be.

It was a canceled project, but the programmers who got fired kept showing up to work. They broke into Apple each day until the software was finished.

The Graphing Calculator Story

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.

read the full story

Would that kind of thing ever happen at Microsoft? I think not.