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 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.
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!
I hope we do shrink software companies down to the mythical "1-person unicorns" so we can be done with this madness.
I prefer the taste of small auteurs to the consensus of product orgs and their politicking. (Add to that whatever design refreshes we are faced with when the designers declare a new design language.)
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
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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".
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...
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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:
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. :/
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
People hear services and think of Apple Music, Apple TV, etc., but the reality is $20B/yr of that “services” revenue is just Google paying Apple to be the default search engine.
Higher profit margin too, which is important. If the trend of supply-chain uncertainty in America continues, Apple might have to expect users to buy fewer, more expensive, and lower-margin Apple products. This isn't an issue if these purchases can lure them into a monthly service subscription though. Someone that owns a single iPad might spend more on software services than the hardware itself over the lifespan of the device. That's a huge opportunity to exploit, while retaining the luxury brand halo people love so much.
The whole "services company" characterization gets thrown around as a way to emphasize how many products Apple still has. But this is how it starts; less investment in disruption and more money funneled into new AppleTV+ episodes or publishing on Apple Arcade. Apple Car, Airpower and arguably Vision Pro are all buried in shallow graves, with AI becoming the heir apparent to Apple's technical sheen. The message is clear: selling you software is Apple's goal.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
Yeah, the federal government used to pay extra for versions of Win/9x with the easter eggs taken out.
Gross.
I hope we do shrink software companies down to the mythical "1-person unicorns" so we can be done with this madness.
I prefer the taste of small auteurs to the consensus of product orgs and their politicking. (Add to that whatever design refreshes we are faced with when the designers declare a new design language.)
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
> 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.
It’s more to do with Quality Control than Product Management
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
> 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.
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?
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".
Microsoft best ever easter eggs was C:\CON\CON
Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?
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.
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.
Article says:
"... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple ..."
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.
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...
Are Apple employees even allowed to build a resume and keep an updated version on LinkedIn?
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.
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.
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.
how is taking up space on someone's HDD worse than taking up space in the very constrained ROM?
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?
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.
and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin? it's 50K. nobody will ever notice
This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to boot in an emergency.
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.
You could absolutely boot a stripped-down Mac OS 8 on a floppy, including the beige G3. Apple even provided them ("Disk Tools").
Apple even still hosts a download of the Disk Tools floppy for MacOS 8.1! https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
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
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.
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!"
> 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?
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.
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?
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
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...
I miss Easter Eggs so much. Let's bring them back.
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. :/
We have the small one in FILE_ID.DIZ
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...
I'm always fascinated by how small teams were in the earlier days of computing, and I wish we could somehow return to that.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Cook's apple is slowly turning into a services company. Services revenue is higher than mac + ipad revenue combined.
People hear services and think of Apple Music, Apple TV, etc., but the reality is $20B/yr of that “services” revenue is just Google paying Apple to be the default search engine.
Higher profit margin too, which is important. If the trend of supply-chain uncertainty in America continues, Apple might have to expect users to buy fewer, more expensive, and lower-margin Apple products. This isn't an issue if these purchases can lure them into a monthly service subscription though. Someone that owns a single iPad might spend more on software services than the hardware itself over the lifespan of the device. That's a huge opportunity to exploit, while retaining the luxury brand halo people love so much.
The whole "services company" characterization gets thrown around as a way to emphasize how many products Apple still has. But this is how it starts; less investment in disruption and more money funneled into new AppleTV+ episodes or publishing on Apple Arcade. Apple Car, Airpower and arguably Vision Pro are all buried in shallow graves, with AI becoming the heir apparent to Apple's technical sheen. The message is clear: selling you software is Apple's goal.
This would have been perfect fodder for Stump the Experts... c'est la vie.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
FWIW, I got it on the second try using Firefox.
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!
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.
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...
'The Team' is the file that's exposed on the ROM disk when you successfully execute the easter egg.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
TFA gives an extensive explanation of how it was found.
Rhetorical question man. I meant who spends time on this stuff.
> 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.
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.
Culminating in the Excel 97 flight simulator: https://eeggs.com/items/29841.html
That's really neat. Sometimes the how is better than the result.
...now do the Black Monolith.
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