“Ron Avitzur knew his project was doomed. By the time his bosses cut the cord in August 1993, his team was actually relieved,” Julia Dahl reports for World’s Strangest. “The graphing calculator program they’d been working on for new mobile devices had finally been shelved, and they could all move on.”
“Most of his fellow programmers were reassigned to other projects within Apple. The company offered Avitzur a job, too, but it didn’t interest him,” Dahl reports. “Avitzur, then 27, had been freelancing at tech companies since he was a student at Stanford—to him, the work wasn’t worth it if it wasn’t interesting. And what interested him was finishing the graphing calculator program that had just been canceled.”
Dahl reports, “But his ambitions were greater than that—Avitzur wanted to make the graphing calculator work on the new PowerPC computer that Apple planned to ship in early 1994… His Apple gig had paid well, and Avitzur lived simply. He could work for almost a year without a paycheck. Plus, Apple had lots of extra offices and computers— who would it hurt if he just kept coming in? It would be the perfect crime.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: Cult of Mac.]