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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!"

> 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.

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.

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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.

how is taking up space on someone's HDD worse than taking up space in the very constrained ROM?

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.

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?

and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin? it's 50K. nobody will ever notice

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.

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.

This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to boot in an emergency.

> 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.

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?

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?

Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?

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.

Microsoft best ever easter eggs was C:\CON\CON

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.

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".

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

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...

Fascinatingly, the System file on the Disk Tools 8.1 floppy is actually a build of System 7, with HFS+ support grafted on.

https://github.com/elliotnunn/HFSPlusBackport/blob/master/re...