This story is old news, but I suspect some of my regulars haven’t heard it before. The true story of how Graphing Calculator shipped on 20 million Macs, and was used to demo an entire new generation of hardware, despite the small problem that the project was canceled and all the employees had been fired.

You have the option of reading the story or listening to it in RealAudio.

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 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.