Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM

These Easter eggs really give an “early desktop PC era” vibe to it all. It’s very human and connects you to the fact that you’re using something that people with faces and names made. Back when these were passion projects by a bunch of hardcore nerds.

But they’d rather you not really see through the product abstraction layer anymore. The Product People want to control the full image of the product and it’s just safest to de-humanize it in case that list is too big or people on that list become undesirables or whatnot.

I’m thinking about what this might look like today. Maybe a neat Easter egg in my iPhone that every time I activate it, it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development. I’d love it, but I imagine this would offend the high tastes of the Product People.

I used to work with a guy who was at apple in the 80s into the mid 90s doing ASIC and board design. One time he mentioned being pissed that with all the blood, sweat, and tears the hardware team put into the design and debug of the hardware system, the software guys would blow 50K of ROM (or whatever) image glorifying the team that designed the computer ... completely leaving out the hardware team.

It's kinda cool and shows that there are real people behind corporations. Some folks with lots of $$$ say "I build this" (Zuck often says that), stealing the credit of accomplishment from small little people. While real small little people leave the note in history - "nope, it's us who put our souls into making this happen". Of course, Steve Jobs would ban this.

Reminds me of the "We made the Amiga, they f----d it up!" message.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...

Somebody once shared an Easter egg on an iPad, where they wrote a little code in the playground app and were able to pull up the next logo from the ROM, or something like that. I reproduced it at the time, but I’ve never been able to find a reference since. This was like 6 years ago or so

Impressive. Interesting how it took that long until someone found the triggering mechanism of this easter egg. Reverse engineering is tough.

Now that I wonder where I could learn RE? Where do I even start? Got any recommendation of online tutorial or book or something?

I miss Easter Eggs so much. Let's bring them back.

> This is probably one of the last easter eggs that existed in the Mac prior to Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple.

People often really deify Steve Jobs, but I dunno. I really like the years the Mac spent wandering the desert. I read things like this and feel like - even if it was a net win - Apple's culture and identity really ended up losing something with his return.

This would have been perfect fodder for Stump the Experts... c'est la vie.

I'm always fascinated by how small teams were in the earlier days of computing, and I wish we could somehow return to that.

I have memories of going to the library in the 90s to read MacWorld. Then learning that if I did a few clicks and maybe keystrokes you may unlock something with the processor. I can’t totally recall what it would unlock but it was for the Apple IIci and it’s 33mhz processor.

This is awesome. There’s something about these old machines that inspire both the creation and discovery of Easter Eggs.

I doubt there will be anyone digging through the EFI or whatever of a MacBook Air in 30 years. If there’s even something there to be found.

I couldn't reproduce this using the Infinite Mac browser tool shared in the article on Firefox, but it's a really cool find regardless. I wonder if Apple today would dare to include anything remotely this fun.

It's really bugging me that he somehow reads "The Team" but not the full string "The Team Break at Event Match - Native" whatever that means.

How in the world did someone find this? The fact that things like this are found is a really an interesting revelation about the collective productivity of the humans race on the planet - all pushing the boundaries of knowledge in everything that we know. There is a scientist in the basement somewhere spending his/her whole life on researching a very small part of the world and maybe it will result in a spectacular finding. Go human race.

> This is probably one of the last easter eggs that existed in the Mac prior to Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple.

Probably a good call. Whenever I see an Easter Egg in software, part of me thinks “cool! That’s fun and harmless!” And the other part of me, the professional part who is responsible for releasing working software on time and minimizing risks, gasps and thinks “what if it wasn’t harmless? What if it triggered a subtle bug that had to be patched and put an entire device’s shipping timeline at risk!” What are you going to write in that postmortem that justifies adding unnecessary code (risk) to the product, just so you could be cool and fun?

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but there are great, appropriate places for fun and whimsy, like personal hobby projects, not your company’s multimillion dollar product.

That's really neat. Sometimes the how is better than the result.

...now do the Black Monolith.

[dead]