This story has probably been passed down through generations of long-time Mac users, but it's the first I've heard of it. Public Radio's This American Life broadcast a program that aired in Dallas on March 13. If you're not familiar with it, it's an incomparably ingenious syndicated program that presents multiple narratives related to a single theme in each hour-long broadcast. The 3/13/2005 show's theme was "Sh This story has probably been passed down through generations of long-time Mac users, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Public Radio’s This American Life broadcast a program that aired in Dallas on March 13. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an incomparably ingenious syndicated program that presents multiple narratives related to a single theme in each hour-long broadcast. The 3/13/2005 show’s theme was “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” One of the segments recounted the adventures of a pair of Apple software engineers. I’ll tell barely enough of the story here to whet your appetite for the RealAudio of the entire program that the show’s producer, WBEZ in Chicago, makes available for free download. Please hit the home page in addition to the deep link. If you’re not a regular of the show, some entries from the archive will get you hooked.I hope those earnest plugs earn me forgiveness for plagiarizing a story that is much more fun by ear. Back in the days when PowerPC-based Macs were just entering the scene, one of Apple Computer’s internal software projects was a really nifty scientific graphing calculator. Apple counts academia, science and technology among its primary markets, so it seemed like a good, if odd, fit. Macs were already in heavy use for visualization. What if you could take the “edit/debug” cycle out of visualization and have the graphics change shape as you enter the equation? It does TI/HP-style 2-D graphs as well. I hated math in school. This thing would have changed my life.As you’ll learn from the This American Life program, Apple killed the project. The developers were canned, but didn’t take their dismissal lying down: Each morning, they’d sneak into the building, camp out in vacant offices and work on the project without anyone knowing. They worked for the longest time among Apple’s paid employees, challenged by nothing but their puzzled expressions. They finally got tossed out when Facilities came to decorate the office in which they were squatting at the time, but the intrepid pair just came back and camped out in a different office.I’ll leave the rest of the intrigue, and there is plenty of it, to the radio show, but through a “stranger than fiction” turn of events and the aid of some unexpected allies, the calculator written by two ex-employees was slipped onto the Mac OS masters and shipped as a standard part of the system software. See, Linux on Intel isn’t the only platform that inspires gifted developers to write commercial software for free.——– Technology Industry