This is a story you might find hard to believe. A guy's project is cancelled and he's laid off, but he just shows up to his building (without being paid) and keeps working on it. He gets other people to help him and the product actually ships! One of my favourite quotes:

"The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends."

Could this happen today? Almost certainly not. It probably couldn't even happen in another company. Remember the start of all this wasn't the support from former coworkers - that only happened once the product was almost done and the glamour of working unpaid on a feature caught on. The start of this was that a laid-off guy's badge still worked, and then when it finally stopped working he was able to tailgate through the doors every morning. Which leads to my second favourite quote:

"We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

A fun read and a reminder of how some people felt (and still feel) about creating software.

Kate