A perennial story here on HN (and elsewhere), with about one link to it per year. Those who like it may also be interested in the Google TechTalk video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY . The previous HN posting with the most comments is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584501 .

If you're like me and love this sort of hacker folklore, here's another great story:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

and of course, everything on folklore.org is great

And here's the NYT story: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/11/business/chip-makers-compe...

It's a shame the photo is missing.

Apparently Steve Newman worked on it too. Is this the same Steve Newman that famously founded Writely (became Google Docs) and almost won at Topcoder one year?

Yes, as well as FullWrite and many other products.

This is one of the best hacker stories of all time.

This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/284/s...

At the end of the story, it said that

"Postscript: After the events described, we made everything retroactively legitimate by licensing the software to Apple for distribution"

It is noble that Apple is licensing the software from them. As the story were told, Apple would have pretty good grounds (developed using Apple property etc) to claim full ownership of the Graphing Calculator software. Kudos to Apple!

The bundled app now is Grapher, which isn't a part of this legend.

But, really, do you think Apple would have made Grapher if Graphing Calculator had never existed?

I'd bet not.

every so often this story comes back up. Still a good read and a good example of 'the spirit of a true hacker' !