
The Graphing Calculator Story (2004) - Nuance
http://www.nucalc.com/Story/
======
CharlesW
If you liked this story,
[https://www.folklore.org/](https://www.folklore.org/) is a treasure trove of
more Apple folklore.

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dang
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=7680696)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176595)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584501)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741](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.)

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iopuy
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

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whoopdedo
> 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?

~~~
avitzur
We were trying to build an iPad with 1992 technology.
[http://arno.org/arnotify/2010/01/penmac/](http://arno.org/arnotify/2010/01/penmac/)

------
jdblair
Here's the picture of the two authors in the New York Times:
[https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/11/business/chip-makers-
comp...](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/11/business/chip-makers-competing-
creeds.html)

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tempodox
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
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.

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cossatot
Is this a vision from a world without open source?

~~~
khedoros1
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).

~~~
ars
This
[https://archive.org/details/TSLSummer1993](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.

~~~
khedoros1
Shareware isn't remotely the same as Open Source, though. It was a more-than-
demo, more-than-full-version copy of a piece of commercial software, generally
designed to be useful on its own, but not useful enough. It was a method of
marketing the full version of the software.

I've got a few CDs of later collections of the stuff. I remember buying
clamshell-packaged games for $5 from Software, Etc (that turned out to be the
first 1/3 of the game, for example). I remember seeing the magazines to order
it from. I'm aware of shareware, and it's not related to what I was talking
about.

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ChuckMcM
And it is probably the nicest graphing calculator on iOS.

~~~
avitzur
Thank you!

