The Covert Family Website

The place for cool things to happen, blah, blah. blah. Whatever. Insert subtitle here.

The Graphing Calculator Story

This is a great story that never fails to motivate me when I get work-depressed.  Ron Avitzur was a software engineer at Apple, working on a great graphing calculator.  One day he came to work to find out his project had been canceled.  Done.  Kaput.

This is the incredible story of how he managed to finish his project AND get it to ship, without anyone the wiser!

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Once again, my sanity was saved by the kindness of a stranger. At 2:00 one morning, a visitor appeared in my office: the engineer responsible for making the PowerPC system disk master. He explained things this way: “Apple is a hardware company. There are factories far away building Apple computers. One of the final steps of their assembly line is to copy all of the system software from the ‘Golden Master’ hard disk onto each computer’s hard disk. I create the Golden Master and FedEx it to the manufacturing plant. In a very real and pragmatic sense, I decide what software does and does not ship.” He told me that if I gave him our software the day before the production run began, it could appear on the Golden Master disk. Then, before anyone realized it was there, thirty thousand units with our software on the disks would be boxed in a warehouse. (In retrospect, he may have been joking. But we didn’t know that, so it allowed us to move forward with confidence.)