[HN Gopher] Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3...
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       Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 285 points
       Date   : 2025-06-24 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
        
       | ryeguy_24 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | Poring 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.
        
           | classichasclass wrote:
           | A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually
           | going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating
           | system.
        
           | grishka wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | BenjiWiebe wrote:
             | I think I disagree with you on both of those points.
             | 
             | On Windows, you typically have to install language packs to
             | get more languages.
             | 
             | Also, how many image resources does Windows-the-OS have,
             | and how large are they? There are some, but the largest I
             | can think of right off are the device icons in the hardware
             | & printers screen. And most of those get installed later
             | since they are part of the driver.
        
               | philistine wrote:
               | macOS contains all languages at boot. You do not need to
               | download anything to switch from English to Japanese.
               | What makes macOS so big these days are the large language
               | models of Apple Intelligence.
        
             | mschuster91 wrote:
             | Add a third thing: AI models. That's going to get more and
             | more obnoxious over the next years.
             | 
             | I just did a "ncdu -x --exclude Volumes --exclude Users /"
             | on my 15.5 (side rant: why the hell is the exclusion
             | necessary to prevent ncdu going into an infinite recursion
             | loop? -x should keep it on the same filesystem, no crossing
             | mountpoints)... and well.
             | 
             | 800 MB in printer drivers (/Library/Printers), 425 MB in
             | audio loops (/Library/Audio/Apple Loops), probably 500 MB
             | in various AI models in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
             | (/MediaAnalysis.framework,
             | /CoreSceneUnderstanding.framework, /CVNLP.framework,
             | /TextRecognition.framework, /CoreHandwriting.framework),
             | around 2 GB of other AI models in /System/Library/AssetsV2
             | (/com_apple_MobileAsset_LinguisticData,
             | /com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_Siri_Understanding,
             | /com_apple_MobileAsset_Trial_Siri_SiriTextToSpeech), 800 MB
             | in /System/Library/LinguisticData, a whopping 550 MB in
             | fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (of which Apple Color
             | Emoji.ttc alone consumes 180 MB of data?!).
             | 
             | So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models _alone_. Crazy. I
             | mean, props to Apple for offering local models that work
             | without internet, that 's far from a given these days (sad
             | enough). But the lowest-spec MBA clocks in at 256 GB disk
             | space... having to waste 1% on AI alone and more on all the
             | other stuff? That's ridiculous.
        
               | Someone wrote:
               | > So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy
               | 
               | I don't think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12
               | GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB
               | 
               | > having to waste 1% on AI alone
               | 
               | Is that 'having to'? I thought those models only get
               | downloaded after you give permission to do so.
               | 
               | Same for some other stuff, I think. /Library/Printers is
               | 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584
               | kB.
        
               | mschuster91 wrote:
               | > I don't think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over
               | 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB
               | 
               | Word is ridiculous, agreed. Xcode isn't mandatory
               | (although I'd LOVE to have it ship without tons of
               | mandatory SDKs, emulators and god knows what else makes
               | up the 12 GB) and I'm not sure if iMovie is.
               | 
               | > Is that 'having to'? I thought those models only get
               | downloaded after you give permission to do so.
               | 
               | I can't remember having ever given macOS the permission
               | to install Siri and the likes.
               | 
               | > /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example
               | and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
               | 
               | Indeed, tried on another machine, no printer drivers
               | there. Probably the culprit is HP, their drivers suck
               | balls. /Library/Audio however, that's just the same size
               | on my M2 MBA as it is on my 2019 MBP.
        
         | noisy_boy wrote:
         | > How in the world did someone find this?
         | 
         | These people are Computing Archeologists - I don't know if that
         | is a formal category but that is how I think of them. They go
         | deeper into software and hardware of the past and bring back
         | such gems before those are lost forever to the tides of
         | e-waste.
        
         | johnklos wrote:
         | Have you ever played with ResEdit? It's a wonderful tool that
         | shows you all sorts of parts of programs and files that you'd
         | need tools like ghidra to show you today. ResEdit came from
         | Apple, though, and is incredibly easy to use.
        
       | iosjunkie wrote:
       | This would have been perfect fodder for Stump the Experts...
       | c'est la vie.
        
       | RomanPushkin wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | dcminter wrote:
         | You know I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, but I do think he was a
         | lot more complicated than the pantomime villain he sometimes
         | gets characterised as. On this particular topic he was, on the
         | contrary, the progenitor of this:
         | 
         | https://www.folklore.org/Signing_Party.html
         | 
         | So no "of course" about it.
         | 
         | Note also that Microsoft had a "no easter eggs" policy starting
         | in the early 2000s. It's not really a Jobs thing.
        
           | thomassmith65 wrote:
           | I posted the same link and then realized you already had.
           | 
           | There's a grain of truth to the grandparent comment but it is
           | distorted by _Occupy Wall Street_ ideology.
        
           | pm215 wrote:
           | Yeah. I think the "signed case" also has some distinctions
           | compared to a typical software easter egg:
           | 
           | - the effects of it are clear
           | 
           | - there's basically no chance of unexpected side effects (I
           | suppose in theory it could structurally weaken the case if
           | the signatures were carved too deeply...)
           | 
           | - if a user stumbles upon it the intention is pretty clear
           | and obviously harmless
           | 
           | - it's not something that might get snuck in without approval
           | of senior management, because it's not hidden in that sense,
           | so there is a limiter on how many of them accumulate and how
           | complicated they might get
           | 
           | which help to explain why you might by policy forbid software
           | easter eggs while still being an advocate for "signing your
           | work".
        
             | dcminter wrote:
             | It's also, I think, worth bearing in mind the extraordinary
             | growth that the computer industry has had. To be CEO of a
             | major computer company in the mid 80s versus the late 90s
             | was a very different level of responsibility.
             | 
             | What people will put up with in a hobbyist and small
             | business environment is very different to what's acceptable
             | in enterprise and beyond. It's all fun and games until
             | someone has to sell to the US government...
        
           | BeFlatXIII wrote:
           | > Microsoft had a "no easter eggs" policy starting in the
           | early 2000s
           | 
           | Note that this was in the aftermath of a summer with multiple
           | major XP security issues.
        
             | baq wrote:
             | came here to say that, too.
             | 
             | imagine your easter egg introduced a vulnerability. a
             | blanket policy like that is literally the first document
             | leadership signs and sends out.
        
             | codys wrote:
             | Were there any Microsoft XP security issues caused by
             | "Easter eggs" prior to that policy change? Or was this just
             | put in place as a policy because it was easy to put in
             | place?
        
               | Analemma_ wrote:
               | I don't think there were any specific security issues
               | caused by Easter eggs but the policy was announced as one
               | of the many changes in their "Trustworthy Computing"
               | initiative.
               | 
               | It seems kinda harsh but it's important to remember the
               | context: at the time, the security situation in Windows
               | and Office was dire and it was (probably correctly)
               | perceived as an existential threat to the company. I
               | think "no Easter eggs" was as much for optics as for its
               | actual effect on the codebase, a way to signal "we know
               | about and stand behind every line of code that gets
               | written; nothing is unaccounted for".
        
             | PhasmaFelis wrote:
             | Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government
             | contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?
        
             | reconnecting wrote:
             | Microsoft best ever easter eggs was C:\CON\CON
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Article says:
           | 
           | "... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he
           | returned to Apple ..."
        
             | dcminter wrote:
             | Yes I know, I read it. I was responding to the parent "of
             | course" insinuation that it was motivated by jealousy of
             | the credit for the Mac. His established promotion of the
             | identity of the contributors gives the lie to this view.
             | 
             | It was probably driven by the same kind of pragmatic
             | business drivers as the later Microsoft ban, i.e. the
             | perception by the market of how "serious" Apple was as a
             | company.
             | 
             | ---
             | 
             | Edit: According to Gizmodo in 2012:
             | 
             | > _He justified the credits ban as a way to avoid
             | headhunters and other companies trying to poach Apple
             | engineering talent. At a time when Apple was sinking
             | rapidly, he said that it made no sense to make the life of
             | the competition easier. He also argued that they were all
             | responsible of the stuff they created in Cupertino. This
             | was a complete change from the 1980s._
        
               | schlauerfox wrote:
               | That makes more sense in light of what came about, a
               | massive industry wage suppression scheme.
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
               | Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | Are Apple employees even allowed to build a resume and
               | keep an updated version on LinkedIn?
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | Jobs was driven. Driven means a lot of things good or bad. It
           | means some people get their feet stepped on because they're
           | milling about instead of moving. People don't understand that
           | doing nothing when there is Shit to Get Done isn't neutral,
           | it's obstructive, and that makes you the Enemy of the Driven.
        
         | mrcwinn wrote:
         | Oh please.
         | 
         | It's unlikely Jobs, having returned to an Apple in crisis,
         | personally knew about some obscure ROM image, its location
         | buried in secret assembly code. More likely, one of those "real
         | people" removed it doing some cleanup.
         | 
         | Jobs routinely and publicly spoke about the amazing people who
         | work for Apple. He spoke with Walt Mossberg about how important
         | it is to build a great team and foster creativity.
        
           | mrpippy wrote:
           | Note that this was the last "OldWorld" Mac (at least desktop
           | Mac, the WallStreet PowerBook G3 was probably a bit later)
           | where the traditional Mac ROM was in an actual hardware ROM.
           | 
           | "NewWorld" started with the iMac: only Open Firmware was in
           | ROM and the classic Mac OS ROM was just a file on disk.
           | 
           | When a HW/SW team is shipping a new Mac and burning a ROM,
           | that feels like an occasion to put in a picture of the team.
           | When you're not burning a ROM and the picture would take up
           | space on everyone's disk...not so much.
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | how is taking up space on someone's HDD worse than taking
             | up space in the very constrained ROM?
        
               | pavlov wrote:
               | The physical ROM chip is a certain size. If you have 50kB
               | left over, it doesn't matter if those bits are zeros or
               | an easter egg.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin?
               | it's 50K. nobody will ever notice
        
               | pavlov wrote:
               | This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to
               | boot in an emergency.
        
               | duskwuff wrote:
               | Not on a G3. These systems shipped with Mac OS 8; the
               | System suitcase was over 6 MB alone. Apple stopped
               | shipping systems with internal floppy drives altogether a
               | few years later, with the iMac and blue-and-white G3.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | didn't OS 8 come on a CD? I installed it from disc in my
               | DVD drive. not sure how old you think the G3 is, but it's
               | not as old as installing from floppy. just barely
        
               | philistine wrote:
               | If you need 32K of ROM because your code is 26K, then
               | that means you have 6K just available that no one will
               | ever be able to access otherwise. Why not use it for an
               | easter egg?
        
           | ThrowawayR2 wrote:
           | That's meaningless, even coming out of Steve Jobs mouth.
           | Every corporate executive publicly speaks about the "amazing
           | people who work for them" and the "importance of building
           | great teams and fostering creativity". Talk is cheap and
           | projecting a corporate image is a core part of their job.
        
         | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
         | while i firmly believe that profit is the theft of unpaid
         | labor...
         | 
         | when it comes to meta salaries, the old Mad Men scene about
         | getting personal recognition for work comes to mind: "that's
         | what the money is for!"
        
           | miles wrote:
           | > i firmly believe that profit is the theft of unpaid labor
           | 
           | If I sell a cake for $3 that cost me $2 in
           | ingredients/electricity/etc. to make, how is my $1 profit the
           | theft of unpaid labor?
        
             | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
             | labor is entitled to an equal share of the profit. if
             | you're the only one who made the cake, your equal share of
             | the profit is $1.
        
       | ryandrake wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | sybercecurity wrote:
         | Probably correct - and looking to stop the inevitable one
         | upmanship that would happen. If one team has an encoded image,
         | then the next wants to do a little game, then a more complex
         | easter egg, etc. until something breaks or causes a PR issue.
        
           | robin_reala wrote:
           | Culminating in the Excel 97 flight simulator:
           | https://eeggs.com/items/29841.html
        
       | wk_end wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | linguae wrote:
         | I'm a big Steve Jobs fan, but I'm also a fan of what I call the
         | "interregnum" years at Apple from 1985 through 1996. Yes,
         | Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were not the greatest leaders,
         | and Apple fumbled hard with Pink/Taligent, Copland, and
         | hardware debacles such as the PowerBook 5300 and the Performa
         | 5200/6200/5300/6300 series (1995 in particular was a disastrous
         | year for Apple).
         | 
         | However, there were many wonderful things about this era. Jean
         | Louis Gassee fought for expandable Macs, and his influence
         | helped lead to the Macintosh II, which started a long series of
         | expandable Macs that went unbroken until the "trash can" 2013
         | Mac Pro was released. System 7 might not have been the most
         | reliable OS, but it had a wonderful UI. Don Norman and Bruce
         | Tognazzini promoted solid UI/UX principles and guidelines.
         | HyperCard is from this time period. Apple's Advanced Technology
         | Group with Larry Tesler, Alan Kay, and many others worked on
         | very interesting projects such as the Dylan programming
         | language and the SK8 environment. OpenDoc was an interesting
         | attempt at making a component-based software platform.
         | 
         | There was also this cozy, whimsical feeling of the classic Mac
         | OS that got lost during the transition to Mac OS X, though I'm
         | greatly appreciative of Mac OS X.
         | 
         | I'm a fan of "interregnum" Apple and also 1997-2011 Apple when
         | Steve Jobs returned, but I'm not much of a fan of Tim Cook's
         | Apple. This is when I felt Apple has changed dramatically from
         | its roots. Apple is financially the most successful it's ever
         | been, but the Mac no longer has the same feeling it once had
         | back in the 1990s or the 2000s. Apple has gone from the Mac
         | company to the iPhone company now.
        
           | Hilift wrote:
           | 1985 Kinko's had a bank of Macs available for anyone to use.
           | I used to go there late thinking it would be less busy but
           | they were usually in use all the time.
        
           | fnord77 wrote:
           | Cook's apple is slowly turning into a services company.
           | Services revenue is higher than mac + ipad revenue combined.
        
           | ilamont wrote:
           | Wasn't Jony Ive also hired during the interregnum period? I
           | think I remember reading in the Isaacson bio that when Jobs
           | came back in the late 90s he encountered Ive who was hired a
           | year or two previously.
        
             | linguae wrote:
             | Yup, Jony Ive was hired before Steve Jobs returned to
             | Apple. In fact, he worked on the 20th Anniversary
             | Macintosh, though he wasn't the sole designer. If I
             | remember correctly, Ive was considering leaving Apple
             | around the time Jobs returned, but Jobs and Ive ended up
             | hitting it off, and the rest became history, as Ive's
             | designs and Jobs' encouragement helped revitalize Apple,
             | beginning with the iMac.
        
       | p_ing wrote:
       | That's really neat. Sometimes the how is better than the result.
       | 
       | ...now do the Black Monolith.
        
       | burnt-resistor wrote:
       | I miss Easter Eggs so much. Let's bring them back.
        
         | reconnecting wrote:
         | We have the small one in FILE_ID.DIZ
         | 
         | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...
        
         | gaudystead wrote:
         | Agreed. They might only be found in smaller projects these
         | days, but I'd love to see them in larger efforts as well. As a
         | kid, discovering/hearing about Easter eggs in a product tended
         | to cause me use it more, if for no other reason than to find
         | the Easter egg. It saddens me that hidden nuggets of joy aren't
         | as popular as they used to be, with even the latest Android
         | versions having very boring "Easter eggs" that amount to a
         | disappointingly sparse interaction for users who have to unlock
         | the developer features. :/
        
       | chrisbrandow wrote:
       | 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
        
       | postexitus wrote:
       | Reminds me of the "We made the Amiga, they f----d it up!"
       | message.
       | 
       | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...
        
       | jan_Sate wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | coldpie wrote:
         | Video games are a good place to start, especially for old
         | consoles like the NES. The impacts of your experimenting are
         | immediately visible, and they're simple devices (though the
         | hardware "APIs" can be pretty unintuitive to a modern
         | programmer), and there's a lot of tooling already built for
         | hacking and reversing them. Try loading up your favorite NES
         | game in Mesen and poke around its debugging tools with
         | nesdev.org open in a browser. If the game you're working with
         | has already been reversed by someone else, you may find some
         | useful info on https://datacrystal.tcrf.net , too.
         | 
         | Reversing more modern software is tricky. I wrote a couple
         | articles a while back about hacking a Gamecube game that you
         | might enjoy:
         | 
         | https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...
         | 
         | https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/02/28/hacking-super-monk...
         | 
         | Accompanying HN discussion:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315368
        
           | bbayles wrote:
           | Agree on video games! I recently found a "developer photo
           | insert" Easter egg in an old 3DO game:
           | https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-
           | ecl...
        
       | MortyWaves wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | pimlottc wrote:
         | These are two separate strings. You can see in the hexdump that
         | the character between them is not a space (0x20) but an
         | unprintable control character (0x1D). The article refers to
         | these as "Pascal strings". Unlike C-style strings, they are not
         | null-terminated, but instead are length-prefixed [0]; the first
         | byte of the string stores the length of the string.
         | 
         | So you can see that "The Team" is indeed a single string,
         | starting with the length of 8 (encoded as 0x08), followed by
         | the string "Break at Event Match - Native" with length of 29
         | (encoded as 0x1D)
         | 
         | 0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-
         | pascal...
        
         | butlike wrote:
         | 'The Team' is the file that's exposed on the ROM disk when you
         | successfully execute the easter egg.
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | > If there's even something there to be found.
         | 
         | But that's the thing right there. We won't _know_ until someone
         | does the search.
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ulfw wrote:
         | I don't know what your odd issue with product people is but
         | this has absolutely nothing to do with Product (management).
         | Software used to be done by a handful of people. Now there are
         | thousands involved across an organisation. For better or worth
         | that's how it is. An Easter Egg highlighting just a few people
         | just doesn't make sense for a large software project nowadays
        
           | rusk wrote:
           | It's more to do with Quality Control than Product Management
        
             | ryandrake wrote:
             | Yea, Quality Control and Risk Management. You really don't
             | want even the slightest risk of messing up the build or the
             | product just so that you can bury some secret treasure in
             | the code! We've all at some point been responsible for a
             | big goof-up in code that we believed to be harmless.
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | Yeah but you write the easter egg in one product cycle
               | and you put it in the code at the beginning of the next,
               | so it has all the time in the world to 'bake'.
        
               | mikepurvis wrote:
               | Not that I don't also wish for a return of more whimsy to
               | software development, but those risks are real-- there
               | have been some pretty high profile embarrassments over
               | the years in connection with pranks and easter eggs. The
               | GMail "mic drop" is an obvious one, also the Spider-Man
               | PS4 proposal was another, plus of course stuff like the
               | GTA Hot Coffee minigame.
        
               | iAMkenough wrote:
               | Also from a Risk Management perspective, you might be
               | embedding the name/photo of a future sociopath or someone
               | who is litigious. The "human" aspect cuts both ways.
        
               | Waterluvian wrote:
               | A consequence of drawing the risk line that far to one
               | end is that products end up having no soul. Perfectly
               | valid for a business to decide that. But it just connects
               | back to my main post and how 80s/90s apple had that vibe
               | that today's apple lacks. They Risk Managed and/or
               | Product Designed until they had a sterile, lifeless
               | product.
               | 
               | I think it's what I pick up on when I feel annoyed at the
               | emulated soul they try to instil with their
               | design/branding/commercials.
               | 
               | I think another example, sibling to easter eggs, would be
               | April Fools. Mind you I hate April Fools, but the soul
               | was sterilized as they Risk Managed their way to
               | jokes/pranks that were guaranteed to be safe.
        
           | zzrrt wrote:
           | > Now there are thousands involved across an organisation...
           | An Easter Egg highlighting just a few people just doesn't
           | make sense
           | 
           | I don't know if the message was edited, but GP addressed this
           | with "Maybe... it shows me a few people at random who played
           | a role in development." Anyway, you could also show thousands
           | of names/faces rapidly but still meaningfully, or let the
           | user explore them slowly. Feels like the other responses are
           | more accurate than it simply being about the quantity of
           | people.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | I wonder too if there was more of this before Agile. With
         | deadline driven development you can run into situations where
         | part of the team is stuck waiting for their teammates to finish
         | something so they can surpass a milestone. You can only poke at
         | the backlog so much. Boredom and being able to rationalize that
         | you aren't really affecting the roadmap by sneaking a little
         | extra something in makes for a lot more 'motive and
         | opportunity' situations.
        
           | HenryBemis wrote:
           | Today some auditor (like me) would fail your ITGCs because of
           | the undocumented partition/file/change/etc (take your pick)
           | and force you to submit a deviation to the SOC team, ask you
           | to "review and update the Secure Design Document to reflect
           | to the change", ask you to create a Jira and/or ServiceNow
           | ticket, etc. etc. etc.
           | 
           | Oh, and you would get a red mark on your "HR P&D record" for
           | the 'Secure Software Policy' violation.
           | 
           | (Shit.. I hated myself writing the above, but it's true)
           | 
           | In 2001 though, we would all laugh if we would have 'caught'
           | the devs doing something cool like this!
        
       | perdomon wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | teejmya wrote:
         | FWIW, I got it on the second try using Firefox.
        
           | perdomon wrote:
           | I get to the part where I type in the file name, but the
           | 'computer' restarts when I get like 3 letters in. Maybe
           | there's a shortcut key associated with the restart function?
           | No idea. Really cool emulator, though!
        
       | tasty_freeze wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | spaceisballer wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | amatecha wrote:
         | My favorite was dragging a text clipping of "secret about box"
         | to the desktop in System 7.5 and it would spawn a breakout game
         | with the dev team's names as "bricks" :) fun times.
        
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