Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Yet More Intellectual Property Weirdness:
Graphing Calculator has been part of the Macintosh ever since. Teachers around the world use it as an animated blackboard to illustrate abstract concepts visually. It shipped on more than twenty million machines. It never officially existed.
Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization. In reality, our motivation was complex. Partly, the PowerPC was an awesome machine, and we wanted to show off what could be done with it; in the Spinal Tap idiom, we said, “OK, this one goes to eleven.”
I still remember seeing this in early 1994 and thinking how cool it was. A great story and a great idea: I am downloading the freeware version (it no longer ships with new hardware) just to see it again.