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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
- p_ing 1y agoThat's really neat. Sometimes the how is better than the result. ...now do the Black Monolith.
- ryeguy_24 1y agoHow 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_ 1y agoPoring 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 1y agoA few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.
- grishka 1y agoA 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 1y agoI 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 1y agomacOS 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 1y agoAdd 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 1y ago> 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.
- noisy_boy 1y ago> 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.
- rightbyte 1y ago"Computing Archeologist" is such a nice word. For some reason I really enjoy "computer archeology" about Super Mario 3 and 64. There is even a total decompile of 64.
- johnklos 1y agoHave 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.
- zahlman 1y agoTFA gives an extensive explanation of how it was found.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- iosjunkie 1y agoThis would have been perfect fodder for Stump the Experts... c'est la vie.
- RomanPushkin 1y agoIt'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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dcminter 1y agoYou 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 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoYeah. 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".
- ryandrake 1y ago> 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 1y agoProbably 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 1y agoCulminating in the Excel 97 flight simulator: https://eeggs.com/items/29841.html https://eeggs.com/items/29841.html
- wk_end 1y ago> 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 1y agoI’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 Gassée 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 1y ago1985 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.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoI miss Easter Eggs so much. Let's bring them back.
- reconnecting 1y agoWe have the small one in FILE_ID.DIZ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno/refs/heads/master/FILE_ID.DIZ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...
- gaudystead 1y agoAgreed. 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 1y agoSomebody 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 1y agoReminds me of the "We made the Amiga, they f----d it up!" message. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...
- jan_Sate 1y agoImpressive. 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 1y agoVideo 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 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-monkey-ball-part-1-banana-bunch-values/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk... https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/02/28/hacking-super-monkey-ball-part-2-decompilation-with-ghidra/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/02/28/hacking-super-monk... Accompanying HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315368
- bbayles 1y agoAgree 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-eclipse?back=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fdrafts https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-ecl...
- enoent 1y agoWithout discrediting the author, as it's always cool to share these findings, was anyone actively looking for this over 27 years? A lot of the times, it just happens that someone was the first person that even bothered trying digging into the code. Specially after decompilation became much more accessible for less popular architectures with Ghidra. Give it a try, there's plenty of low hanging fruit! I've submitted another case some time ago. Also luckily, considering other OS easter eggs, it doesn't seem like there was any obfuscation involved, like "chained xor stored in bitmap resource of badly supported executable format": https://x.com/mswin_bat/status/1504788425525719043 https://x.com/mswin_bat/status/1504788425525719043
- MortyWaves 1y agoIt'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 1y agoThese 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-strings https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-pascal...
- butlike 1y ago'The Team' is the file that's exposed on the ROM disk when you successfully execute the easter egg.
- tambourine_man 1y agoThis 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoThese 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt’s more to do with Quality Control than Product Management
- ryandrake 1y agoYea, 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 1y agoYeah 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'.
- perdomon 1y agoI 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.
- tasty_freeze 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoMy 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.
- JeremyHerrman 1y agoSet the monitor to color and the date to September 20th, 1989. Then boot while holding ⌘-⌥-C-I to see an image of the dev team. https://compmuseum.org/blog/iici-easter-egg/ https://compmuseum.org/blog/iici-easter-egg/
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoI'm always fascinated by how small teams were in the earlier days of computing, and I wish we could somehow return to that.
- smusamashah 1y agoIn the time of Windows 98 and XP, the Adobe photoshop and other many other software use to have easter egg in Help -> About screen. You open this dialog, press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + (Enter probably) and it use to roll credits very fast or show something else, jokes sometimes, or a different background animation. I distinctly remember it was more than just Adobe software that had these. I use to try it in any tool tools I was playing around with (I use to try lots of software just to see what they do) and often found something here. These stopped being a thing at some point and I eventually stopped looking for these.