The Graphing Calculator Story (2004)

http://www.nucalc.com/Story/

by Nuance • 8 years ago

133 21 8 years ago

cossatot• 8 years ago

Is this a vision from a world without open source?

wtallis• 8 years ago

It's the world before the World Wide Web actually lived up to its name. At the time, they were entirely correct that getting their software pre-installed on Macs was the only way they could get it in the hands of most school users.

foobar1962• 8 years ago

I worked at a university in Australia in from 1991 to 2003 in the IT department. Before the www there were huge open software repositories like info-Mac (and another that escapes me atm, maybe at Berkeley) openly accesible through ftp.

scarface74• 8 years ago

The PPC was introduced in 1994. The only way normal people downloaded software was via AOL, Compuserve, etc.

I was able to call into a free BBS run by the University of Georgia that ran a gopher server. Some way, I was able to telnet to Nyx and get a free shell account I could use to get to ftp freeware sites, but most people couldn't do that.

khedoros12• 8 years ago

Open source existed, but wasn't as easy to distribute as it is now. I'm also not sure that the education-model Macs would've had a development environment installed to assemble the source (if the Macs I used in the mid-90s at school had software development tools, I was never aware of them, anyhow). And I'm not sure what the options would've looked like for acquiring an open-source set of dev tools for the Mac anyhow (especially considering that Power was a new, still rare hardware architecture at the time).

duskwuff• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if MPW[1] was free when Graphing Calculator was written. It certainly wasn't easy to find or to use, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

ars• 8 years ago

This https://archive.org/details/TSLSummer1993 is how you got Open Source software before the Internet (back then called Shareware - although technically they are not the same thing).

BBS's existed but were too slow, and expensive.

iopuy• 8 years ago

I think we have all learned the era of cheeky hijinks like these is over. Trespass in a building like they did and you might just be reading about yourself on the internet in a whole different context, with an unflattering mugshot to boot.

saagarjha• 8 years ago

At Apple? Campus security would probably have a discussion with you if you stayed on their premises for too long without a badge.

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

It's interesting. Historically there have always been these sort of back channel, side channel, unofficial ways of doing all sorts of things, some of them basically critical to the operation of a functional society. Yet as society has become more developed we tend to formalize the "official" ways of doing things while pretending that everything else was irrelevant (or, worse, harmful). And then life becomes more restricted with less room for imagination and exploration, with obvious negative consequences for innovation, among many other things. It may not be possible to maintain all of the unofficial side channels and so forth as things advance but it's critical that people think about them and be thoughtful about how to replace them.

dang• 8 years ago

Posted many times but no discussion in the last few years, so this is ok. Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176595

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584501

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741

That last id is awfully small. I wonder what other perennials have first ids less than that. Story of Mel perhaps? (Edit: nope.)

tempodox• 8 years ago

The Graphing Calculator was the most impressive bundled software I had seen by then. And it really did showcase the PowerPC‘s speed vs the previous 68k CPUs. I was surprised to learn that it had to be snuck in that way. I think the project would have merited full support.

chii• 8 years ago

If it was an official decision to ship a calculator app, would it have been made as impressive as this one?

I wonder, because the passion required to ship this impressive app is only there perhaps, due to the nature of the people doing it, and not due to any management oversight.

CharlesW• 8 years ago

If you liked this story, https://www.folklore.org/ is a treasure trove of more Apple folklore.

whoopdedo• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day... In August 1993, the project was canceled.

I can't think what the secret project might have been. It's not Pink, was it? I thought that happened a few years later. Anyone have an idea?

avitzur2• 8 years ago

We were trying to build an iPad with 1992 technology. http://arno.org/arnotify/2010/01/penmac/

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

And it is probably the nicest graphing calculator on iOS.

avitzur2• 8 years ago

Thank you!

jdblair• 8 years ago

Here's the picture of the two authors in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/11/business/chip-makers-comp...

The Graphing Calculator Story (2004)

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