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

(www.downtowndougbrown.com)
388 points zdw | 8 comments | 24 Jun 25 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | 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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mrcwinn ◴[24 Jun 25 14:54 UTC] No.44366930[source]▶
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.

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mrpippy ◴[24 Jun 25 15:19 UTC] No.44367185[source]▶
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.

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dylan604 ◴[24 Jun 25 15:44 UTC] No.44367451[source]▶
how is taking up space on someone's HDD worse than taking up space in the very constrained ROM?
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1. pavlov ◴[24 Jun 25 15:53 UTC] No.44367547[source]▶
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.
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2. dylan604 ◴[24 Jun 25 16:30 UTC] No.44367958[source]▶
and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin? it's 50K. nobody will ever notice
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3. pavlov ◴[24 Jun 25 17:10 UTC] No.44368411[source]▶
This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to boot in an emergency.
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4. duskwuff ◴[24 Jun 25 19:38 UTC] No.44370153{3}[source]▶
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.
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5. dylan604 ◴[24 Jun 25 22:49 UTC] No.44371879{3}[source]▶
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
6. classichasclass ◴[25 Jun 25 00:07 UTC] No.44372381{4}[source]▶
You could absolutely boot a stripped-down Mac OS 8 on a floppy, including the beige G3. Apple even provided them ("Disk Tools").
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7. kalleboo ◴[25 Jun 25 04:25 UTC] No.44373605{5}[source]▶
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...
8. elliotnunn ◴[26 Jun 25 07:49 UTC] No.44385166{5}[source]▶
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...