Apple Infiltration

I ran accross a rather inspiring story about hacking. It's not about breaking through security features, well aside from building security - but it's moreso about building software for the sake of building software.

In 1993, Ron Avitzur was let go by Apple. He was working on a project that was cancelled. His piece of the project however, was completely viable in his mind - although the CPU power it would require for effective use wasn't going to be available to the general public until Apple released it's powerPC systems in 1994.

Unemployed and a little bit jaded, he continued to work on the project - continuing to get into the building because his badge had not been cancelled. Friends and other Apple employees saw what he was doing and teamed up to help him. Eventually, he was caught because the facilities folks tried to occupy his office with another employee. They promptly cancelled his badge and removed him from the building. Undeterred, he started sneaking into the building with the other employees in the morning.

Eventually, the project got to a point where he needed more help, official help. If the software was going to be released with Apple's new systems, it would have to be thoroughly tested, translated to a number of languages, and of course given the golden stamp of approval to get on the master disc.

So he arranged a Demo. Everybody loved the software. When queried as to why nobody had heard of the project, Ron and Greg Robbins (his partner in crime) fessed up to their clandestine activities. After being told not to tell that story anymore they received all the support they needed.

The software? The graphing calculator that has long since become a staple among math teachers and students everywhere.

The story really highlights the hacking mentality that was around in the '70 and '80s when I was introduced to computing. In the early '90s things started to take a different turn while the media and government alike sensationalized and criminalized Kevin Mitnick and turned the term "hacker" into something bad. In the early days, everybody was a hacker - we had to be. If you wanted to learn an operating system or a programming language or a networking environment you had to hack your way through it and learn on your own. We'd post on BBS's and share information at a lightning quick 2400bps. There were no experts back then, just teams of people building off of each others work and knowledge.

Now that there's a corporation out there interested in owning anything that you develop, things are different. Projects get bogged down with beaurocratic bs, office politics and ego battles and people tend to forget why they are doing what they are doing. I do what I do because it's cool. Every once in a while I take a look at something I accomplished and I'm crazy impressed with the ingenuity involved. Every once in a longer while, someone else gets impressed too. It feels good and it's fun. And you never know when you can change the world in the process.