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

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.

Having been at this long enough to have put Easter eggs of my own into works I've done, I can say that the biggest issue is the lack of stomach for introducing a possible failure point to the software for little more than shits and giggles, especially when software has gotten so complex and big. That and who has the time to build silly stuff at work anymore. I feel like we're constantly at 120%.

There are still places for good easter eggs.

In a past life I did technical writing and slipped all sorts of fun things into my documentation: Multiple 4/20 references, my birthday, in-jokes from the team that I was working with, even the occasional proper meme. When I needed a link? Something funny from the official corporate channel on YouTube that I could get away with. Needed a company name? I checked every trademark we had on file to find Something.

Never be afraid to hide something wonderful in your code. The header for UFS2 contains the author's birthday [0] and OpenVMS has several interesting exit code states [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick [1] https://www.parsec.com/os/openvms/undocumented.php?page=13