How an Apple Engineer Pranked Billion-Dollar Lawyers (and Won)

The Beatles Apple billion dollar lawsuit. That  little sound right there was born from all three. Yes, it's the alert tone that's been shipping  on Mac since 1991 and it's called so sue me and is literally a 30-year-old prank that an Apple  engineer pulled on a team of billiondoll lawyers

and then smuggled it into the operating system  and then the meaning of it for over a decade. Say the name out loud slowly. So sue me. So yes,  sue me. Hey everyone, my name is Annaniel Kubo and today we're rewinding the clock because this  is one of the best engineer versus legal stories

and there's a lesson in it for every single  one of us who has ever had to name something in our code. So our main character here is a  man named Jim Reeks and in the late 1980s Jim is a sound designer and engineer at Apple working  on something called the sound manager in system

7 which is basically the part of the Mac that  handles audio. And if you've ever used an old Mac, you've heard Jim's work. That magical startup  cord when your machine powers on, that's him.

The camera shutter click your iPhone still makes  today when you take a photo, also him. The guys responsible for some of the most hard sounds on  planet up. But the one we care about today is a tiny xylophone alert. Beep. And to understand why  I ended up with the most passive aggressive name

in software history, we have to talk about a  lawsuit. It consists of two famous companies called Apple. There's Apple Computer, the one you  know, and then there's Apple Corpse, the record label founded by the Beatles back in 1968. And  these two have some serious beef. Back in 1978,

Apple Corpse sued Apple Computers over the name  Apple as trademark infringement. They settled out of court and the deal is basically fine. You can  be Apple, just stay out of the music business. You do computers, we do music. Cool. except computers  slowly starting getting real good at music. Apple

added sound chips. They added the ability to  record audio. They added MIDI, the standard that lets you plug musical instruments into a computer.  And Apple Corpse looks at this and goes, "Huh, that sounds an awful lot like the music business."  So, they sue again. And the fallout from all of

this lands directly on the desk of our engineer  Jim Ree because now every single sound, every musical feature has to get reviewed by Apple's  legal department, including the names. Now, here's where every developer watching is going to feel a  little something in their soul. Legal didn't just

review the sounds. They started coming after the  names of things in the code. And I mean down to the API level. Jim gets told he had to rename a  command in the API. It was called note cmd as in musical note to frequency cmd because note sounded  too musical. And any of you who've shipped real

software know exactly why that's a nightmare.  You don't just rename a public API on a whim. Other applications are depending on the name.  Rename it and you break everyone's code right before a deadline. And this is the kind of thing  that makes engineers lose their minds. being told

to rename a perfectly good working identifier for  a reason that has nothing to do with the software and everything to do with a lawsuit. So Jim's just  sitting there frustrated watching lawyers redefine his work. And one of his alert sounds, a little  xylophone tone, originally just called xylophone,