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

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.

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.

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.