A favourite thing for the developers behind a complex software project is to embed an Easter egg: something unexpected that can be revealed only by those in the know. Apple certainly had their share of them in their early days, a practice brought to a close by Steve Jobs on his return to the company. One of the last Macs to contain one was the late 1990s beige G3, and while its existence has been know for years, until now nobody has decoded the means to display it on the Mac. Now [Doug Brown] has taken on the challenge.
The Easter egg is a JPEG file embedded in the ROM with portraits of the team, and it can’t be summoned with the keypress combinations used on earlier Macs. We’re taken on a whirlwind tour of ROM disassembly as he finds an unexpected string in the SCSI driver code. Eventually it’s found that formatting the RAM disk with the string as a volume name causes the JPEG to be saved into the disk, and any Mac user can come face to face with the dev team. It’s a joy reserved now for only a few collectors of vintage hardware, but still over a quarter century later, it’s fascinating to learn about. Meanwhile, this isn’t the first Mac easter egg to find its way here.
The bitter irony is that most people today have no concept of using the computer and would not be able to extract this file even if they had the step-by-step instruction. Smartphones and tablets should be banned and people should be forced to learn IT skills on real computers.
There are always a few exceptions to this, though.
People say the youth is obsessed with mobile devices, but perhaps they simply have been raised that way.
Not few of them are interested in interacting with physical things.
It’s new to them and they’re slowly being fed up with wiping on a glass screen for all their life.
This video gives a good summary of the matter, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dEJiQnotR8
It’s the old division of “creation” versus “consumption”; back 15 or so years ago when the iPad kickstarted the tablet/touchscreen form-factor(1) the (slightly snooty) attitude in the tech company I worked for was that tablets were for consuming content that other people had created on “proper” computers.
(1) yes, before everyone screams at me, I know there were tablets and touchscreens long before the iPad, but as is so often the case with Apple, they took the concept and democratized/popularized it to the masses…
Gods forbid people actually use computers for a real purpose instead of for the sake of tinkering with the computer itself
Become a developer and enjoy doing both. 🥲
First time here?
Yeah, we should ban all the stuff we don’t like and force everyone to do stuff we want them to but they don’t want to.
Nothing wrong with that if it serves the purpose of betterment of human race. If we worked together like ants in a colony we could literaly transform the Earth. Instead of working together to build a new civilization, millions of people waste their lives watching TikTok or playing video games.
January, 30th 1933.
What tripe, we work together on scales so far beyond how ants work, and we have transformed the Earth. Both humans and ants only “build a new civilisation” when there are both pressure from inside and room to do so outside.
You are referring to Calhoun’s Mice Utopia right? IMO we’re currently at the final stage and soon (in 2-5 years) our current society will totally collapse.
What if it turns out all along the meaning of life was to watch tiktok?
I’m sure that if you assign values to and sum the letters t-i-k-t-o-k and apply some mathematical wizardry… and give it a really nice fresh hot cup of tea… you’ll get the answer 42 :)
Let me guess, you were wearing an onion on your belt, which was the style at the time?
Yep, and he didn’t have white onions, because of the war.
gimee 5 bees for a quarter
Smartphones and tablets ARE computers.
.. and consumption devices. Locked into an closed, commercial environment.
An old fashioned desktop computer is a development tool,
a typewriter, a magical universal machine in short.
It also used to be an completely open architecture,
it could be expanded by expansion card,
users were free to install any software,
including the OS of choice.
Even 8-Bit home computers did have this advantage over a modern day mobile device.
Anyone reading this site is going to be deeply familiar with using a desktop computer.
You’re just doing “Old Man Yells at Cloud”
The cloud doesn’t exist, it’s just someone’s else computer.
I kind of agree that most computing today is a complex tool for turning mass numbers of human beings into insane morons. Humans are hackable as they say, and the most simple and entertaining way to hack them is to break them, so that is what most commonly happens. The internet was better as a refuge for weird nerds, not the synthetic reality of everyone in the species
In macOS, if you have a Windows PC in your network, and then browse to Network in a Finder window, the PC will be listed as found on the network. And the icon is a 90’s CRT monitor showing a Blue Screen Of Death (other systems will show a wide screen LCD screen). I would consider that to be an easter egg still.
Having used Windows, Mac and Linux extensively over the years, I’m not sure I’d call it an Easter egg!
But it’s humorous. I like it. ^^
As long as people keep a sense of humor and irony, there’s hope.
Also: Cats, bunnies, unicorns and stuff. Wonderful things.
Kinda like the Sosumi sound or Clarus. Fun when you know the backstory, but not an Easter egg.
Just wondering, how exactly do we know it’s the last Easter egg?
Maybe they just got better at hiding them, I had the same thought. Jobs was quite a hawk, so maybe he really did keep them from doing it, but I find it doubtful…
Also Easter eggs have a utilitarian use in figuring out if somebody stole your code. A lot of the time an inept thief will leave the eggs intact, instantly proving who actually owns it. I think that was the plot of a Michael Crichton novel…