alt Hacker NewsPoring over the raw files, basically, looking for patterns / strings / etc that might be interesting; I'd argue that it's a bit easier for older operating systems as the modern ones are much, much bigger (MacOS 8 which was on the PowerMac G3 used in the article was 120 MB, MacOS 11 requires something like 35 GB.
But I suppose also there's less fun allowed, the article mentions this easter egg was removed in 1997 when Jobs returned.
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A lot of the size of the modern operating systems comes from two things:
- modern screens are higher resolution, and so require much larger image resources.
- modern OSes contain all translations in them. In the 90s it was common to have language-specific versions that only contain that language and maybe English.
In the specific case of macOS, it also contains double the code it needs because it runs on both x86 and ARM.
A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.