Doing it anyway

It’s the tale of a software engineer at Apple Computer – Ron Avitzur – who had been charged with creating some graphing calculator software, to ship with every Apple computer. After a year on the project he lost his job in 1993 because – he says – of internal politics at what was, at the time, a struggling company. The key thing is what Ron did next.

He kept showing up for work.

His swipe card worked, there were lots of empty offices, so he just kept going, unpaid, for months, creating a fully-fleged and entirely unauthorised skunkworks at the heart of the company.

Along the way, he roped in support from various specialist departments and, after huge amounts of work from across the company – and all without top management knowledge – he got the software shipped on every new Mac computer. The software is still going out today, although the relationship between Ron and Apple has, at last, been formalised.