At the risk of giving Elroy the blog-hater some ammo to use in our constant arguments about whether or not I am an Apple fan-boy, I post this entry about a couple interesting Apple stories I've read recently.
First up, a quick story about the origin of the weird little icon on the 'Apple' button:
Swedish Campground
Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.
Secondly, a considerably longer and more entertaining story about the creation of the graphing calculator software for Macs:
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.
It goes on to talk about how he worked for months and months on this project, recruiting others to help, getting caught and thrown out, sneaking back in, and finally getting the software included in the original release of the Mac OS for the PowerPC. It's really a good read, even if you're not a techy type.
I found the calculator story from this
37signals, and the Swedish campsite story from
SimpleBits.
