Skunkworks, underground, and off-the-radar initiatives are a lot more common in large technology organizations than people might imagine. While you may have "Product Action Committee's" and "Executive Commits" and "Roadmaps" that theoretically set the mandate/budget and resourcing for the company, many of the best projects occur because a few (sometimes only one) smart engineer or manager gets it in their mind to do their own thing.<p>I will admit, it takes a little gall to hide an entire T&E budget to Japan on a skunkworks project though. Great Story.
Hee. We used to find Twiggy drives in various places (typically in the back of labs when we moved, or when some older cow-orker quit and left boxes of crap behind). We'd send the drives via inter-office mail to one of the original hardware guys responsible for the Twiggy.<p>We were still finding the damned things and shipping them off to him in 1993. The H/W guy had a pretty good sense of humor about it.<p>What future albatrosses are /you/ working on? :-)
This is a great story. Not only were the engineers brave enough to defy Jobs, but also Jobs being able to admit his own mistake and not fire the entire team upon finding out. Signs of true leadership all round.
Anyone who wants to read a fascinating insight into the early days of personal computer development should read this entire site - it evokes wonderful memories for me of how exciting it all was in those days, and how a few guys can develop a historical product all on their own.
So, Steve Jobs wasn't always above secretly copying another company's product the way he claims to be now.<p>"Cupertino, start your photocopiers." (<a href="http://www.macnews.com/content/wwdc-apple-blasts-microsofts-longhorn" rel="nofollow">http://www.macnews.com/content/wwdc-apple-blasts-microsofts-...</a>)