Apple's Skunkworks Graphing Calculator

I had heard the story of how the Apple Graphing calculator came about from an ex-Apple employee years ago - it's kind of a Silicon Valley legend. But now the full story is available online and it's even more hi-larious than the variant I had heard:

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

They go on to convince people to help them and manage to get it shipped as part of the power PC without Apple ever paying them a dime.

In October, when we thought we were almost finished, engineers who had been helping us had me demonstrate our software to their managers. A dozen people packed into my office. I didn't expect their support, but I felt obliged to make a good-faith effort to go through their official channels. I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." Afterward, they asked, "Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven't we seen this earlier?" I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn't exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."

The Skunkworks project is, frankly, a lot of what keeps Silicon Valley going. For every massive project designed to "change the world" with scheduling milestones and project planning meetings, there are dozens of projects like this. Okay, not exactly like this - usually working on the Skunkworks project also entails slogging away on NextBigThing 3.1 so that you still get paid. But the reality is nothing can really stop the crazy engineer from going off and doing what they want if they set their mind to it and Silicon Valley owes a lot more of it's success to the skunkworks projects than to the "great" ones. If your an engineer, no one is going to tell you to go off an do something like this - you pretty much have to develop a thick skin and not care what anyone else thinks. As a former boss of mine (who was also importantly an engineer too) used to say "To ask permission is to seek denial".