As developer Ron Avitzur observes in his entertaining history of the Graphing Calculator, a program he built for the first Apple PowerMacs, in all software development it's the first 90 percent of the work that's the easy bit, and the second 90 percent that wears you down. And the third 90 percent that separates good software from bad. What makes Avitzur’s story unique is not this creative approach to arithmetic, however, but that the final 180 percent was completed by sneaking into Apple's offices while no-one was looking...

06 Jan 2005