CoRecursive: Coding Stories · Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer

Story: Shipping Graphing Calculator

·47 min·4 clips

Ron worked at Apple for nine months without a contract or pay, betting everything on his graphing calculator dream.

Adam Gordon-Bell of CoRecursive profiles Ron Avitzur, a programmer who spent 35 years building educational math software, beginning with a program called Milo that he wrote as a physics student in 1992 to handle mathematical notation that computers at the time could not. The main story concerns the Apple Graphing Calculator, a visually impressive interactive tool Avitzur was contracted to build for the Newton platform before Apple cancelled the project. Rather than accept the cancellation, Avitzur and a friend named Greg Robbins, who had also been laid off, continued coming to the Apple campus every day without authorization, borrowing machines and continuing to develop the software. They relied on the fact that in a large company someone confidently walking around is rarely questioned. The technical challenge was significant: getting a real-time three-dimensional graphing calculator to run fast enough on PowerPC hardware required deep optimization work, exploiting undocumented processor behaviors. Avitzur describes this as code so completely crazy it was unbelievable. The episode details the social engineering involved, the borrowed badges, the improvised office space, and the internal allies they cultivated who quietly ensured the project could keep going without official authorization. When Apple decided to bundle the Graphing Calculator with every PowerPC Mac, it shipped on millions of machines with nobody in management having been officially involved in its creation. Gordon-Bell explores what drives programmers to work on things that might never ship, and what distinguishes people who can accept cancellation from those who fundamentally cannot. The tone blends admiration with wry humor, treating Avitzur's audacity as both inspiring and slightly absurd. The audience is software developers and anyone who has ever had a project they believed in cancelled by forces beyond their control.

As heard by us

A canceled Apple math-software project becomes a story about stubbornness, timing, and a work rescue that almost runs out of road.

A canceled Apple math-software project turns into a study of stubbornness, timing, and the odd afterlife of work that nearly shipped. It is at its best when a whiteboard estimate, a PowerPC deadline, and a few sympathetic engineers make the rescue feel concrete rather than…

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Listen if you want a stubborn software story about a canceled Apple-era project that would not stay dead.

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