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

(www.downtowndougbrown.com)
388 points zdw | 7 comments | 24 Jun 25 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.043s | source | bottom
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RomanPushkin ◴[24 Jun 25 14:38 UTC] No.44366760[source]▶
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.
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dcminter ◴[24 Jun 25 14:50 UTC] No.44366886[source]▶
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.

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1. BeFlatXIII ◴[24 Jun 25 15:31 UTC] No.44367304[source]▶
> 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.

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2. baq ◴[24 Jun 25 16:39 UTC] No.44368073[source]▶
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.

3. codys ◴[24 Jun 25 17:17 UTC] No.44368489[source]▶
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?
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4. PhasmaFelis ◴[24 Jun 25 17:47 UTC] No.44368804[source]▶
Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?
5. reconnecting ◴[24 Jun 25 19:16 UTC] No.44369877[source]▶
Microsoft best ever easter eggs was C:\CON\CON
6. Analemma_ ◴[24 Jun 25 20:32 UTC] No.44370712[source]▶
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".

7. ◴[24 Jun 25 22:09 UTC] No.44371582[source]▶