Randy Wigginton
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Randy Wigginton was one of Apple Computer's first employees (#6), creator of MacWrite, Full Impact and numerous other Mac applications. He used to work in development at eBay and now works at Quigo, Inc.
Wigginton was a student at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, interested in computers just as the earliest microprocessor-based computers were being assembled by hobbyists. He had heard about the Homebrew Computer Club but had no way to get there until he started getting rides with another club member, Steve Wozniak. The two hit it off, and Wigginton became one of Apple's earliest employees in 1976, and was present with Woz when the Apple I was first presented to the world at a Club meeting.
Wigginton collaborated with Wozniak on the circuit design and ROM software for the Apple II in 1977. As Woz wired up color graphics circuitry, Wiggington wrote machine language graphics subroutines, and Chris Espinosa, another high school student, wrote demo programs in BASIC. Wigginton wrote several early programs for the Apple II, including a checkbook-balancing program co-authored with Apple's vice-president of Marketing Mike Markkula. Wigginton wrote a new BASIC, called Applesoft BASIC, as an answer to Microsoft BASIC, which had floating-point arithmetic. Wigginton was not trained in numerical analysis, but he managed to write a set of floating-point routines, which worked fairly well. However, there were a few anomalies: In the Applesoft BASIC Reference Manual, writer Brian Howard included a section entitled "Rounding can be Curious." he demonstrated that the ROUND function, which rounds a number to a prescribed accuracy, is not monotonic: in other words, for some x and y, such that x<y, ROUND(x)> ROUND(y). Most users never noticed this "feature," but Howard had to mention it in the manual, to the amusement of Jef Raskin, Apple's Manager of Publications/New Product Review. (A few years later, Apple hired a few real numerical analysts, including a coauthor of the IEEE Standard 754 for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic to develope the Standard Apple Numerics Environment, which ensured that every computer made by Apple, in every computer language supported by Apple, would give the same IEEE-standard result for any computation: for example, 1/+0 =+∞, and +0/+0 = NAN (Not a Number, a special code prescribed by the standard to represent an indeterminate or other non-numeric result) IEEE arithmetic doesn't complain about division by zero: it yields an infinity with the same sign as the zero: however, zero divided by zero is one of the classical indeterminate forms studied in freshman calculus classes so the result is non-numeric. Infinities and NANs propagate through a compound computation, so that the machine returns a valid numeric result whenever it is mathematically possible, or else a NAN that explains why a valid numeric result is not possible.)
Perhaps his most critical early contribution was the RWTS (read/write track-sector) routines for the Disk II, the 5 1/4" floppy disk controller introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show in early 1978. Wigginton and Wozniak wrote the final version of the software in Wozniak's hotel room on the eve of the show.
In 1979 Apple's President Mike Scott enlisted Wigginton to write a secret competitor to VisiCalc, to use as leverage against VisiCorp (then Software Arts). To keep the project under wraps, it was given the code name Mystery House.
[edit] After the Shareholders Meeting
Wigginton left Apple in September 1981 and formed Encore to work on his own. However he was quickly contracted by Apple to help work on MacWrite on a semi-formal basis. When the Apple Macintosh shipped in 1984 he again turned to his own projects, starting a new spreadsheet that would eventually be released after four tortuous years as Full Impact.
