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

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/06/finding-a-27-year-old-easter-egg-in-the-power-mac-g3-rom/

by zdw • 1 year ago

394 120 1 year ago

ryeguy_242• 1 year ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

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.

classichasclass2• 1 year ago

A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.

grishka• 1 year ago

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.

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

How in the world did someone find this?

These people are Computing Archeologists - I don't know if that is a formal category but that is how I think of them. They go deeper into software and hardware of the past and bring back such gems before those are lost forever to the tides of e-waste.

rightbyte• 1 year ago

"Computing Archeologist" is such a nice word.

For some reason I really enjoy "computer archeology" about Super Mario 3 and 64. There is even a total decompile of 64.

johnklos• 1 year ago

Have you ever played with ResEdit? It's a wonderful tool that shows you all sorts of parts of programs and files that you'd need tools like ghidra to show you today. ResEdit came from Apple, though, and is incredibly easy to use.

zahlman• 1 year ago

TFA gives an extensive explanation of how it was found.

ryeguy_242• 1 year ago

Rhetorical question man. I meant who spends time on this stuff.

iosjunkie• 1 year ago

This would have been perfect fodder for Stump the Experts... c'est la vie.

RomanPushkin• 1 year ago

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.

dcminter3• 1 year ago

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.

thomassmith65• 1 year ago

I posted the same link and then realized you already had.

There's a grain of truth to the grandparent comment but it is distorted by Occupy Wall Street ideology.

pm215• 1 year ago

Yeah. I think the "signed case" also has some distinctions compared to a typical software easter egg:

- the effects of it are clear

- there's basically no chance of unexpected side effects (I suppose in theory it could structurally weaken the case if the signatures were carved too deeply...)

- if a user stumbles upon it the intention is pretty clear and obviously harmless

- it's not something that might get snuck in without approval of senior management, because it's not hidden in that sense, so there is a limiter on how many of them accumulate and how complicated they might get

which help to explain why you might by policy forbid software easter eggs while still being an advocate for "signing your work".

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

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.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Article says:

"... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple ..."

hinkley6• 1 year ago

Jobs was driven. Driven means a lot of things good or bad. It means some people get their feet stepped on because they're milling about instead of moving. People don't understand that doing nothing when there is Shit to Get Done isn't neutral, it's obstructive, and that makes you the Enemy of the Driven.

mrcwinn• 1 year ago

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.

mrpippy• 1 year ago

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.

ThrowawayR2• 1 year ago

That's meaningless, even coming out of Steve Jobs mouth. Every corporate executive publicly speaks about the "amazing people who work for them" and the "importance of building great teams and fostering creativity". Talk is cheap and projecting a corporate image is a core part of their job.

GuinansEyebrows2• 1 year ago

while i firmly believe that profit is the theft of unpaid labor...

when it comes to meta salaries, the old Mad Men scene about getting personal recognition for work comes to mind: "that's what the money is for!"

miles• 1 year ago

i firmly believe that profit is the theft of unpaid labor

If I sell a cake for $3 that cost me $2 in ingredients/electricity/etc. to make, how is my $1 profit the theft of unpaid labor?

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

This is probably one of the last easter eggs that existed in the Mac prior to Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple.

Probably a good call. Whenever I see an Easter Egg in software, part of me thinks “cool! That’s fun and harmless!” And the other part of me, the professional part who is responsible for releasing working software on time and minimizing risks, gasps and thinks “what if it wasn’t harmless? What if it triggered a subtle bug that had to be patched and put an entire device’s shipping timeline at risk!” What are you going to write in that postmortem that justifies adding unnecessary code (risk) to the product, just so you could be cool and fun?

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but there are great, appropriate places for fun and whimsy, like personal hobby projects, not your company’s multimillion dollar product.

sybercecurity• 1 year ago

Probably correct - and looking to stop the inevitable one upmanship that would happen. If one team has an encoded image, then the next wants to do a little game, then a more complex easter egg, etc. until something breaks or causes a PR issue.

robin_reala• 1 year ago

Culminating in the Excel 97 flight simulator: https://eeggs.com/items/29841.html

wk_end• 1 year ago

This is probably one of the last easter eggs that existed in the Mac prior to Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple.

People often really deify Steve Jobs, but I dunno. I really like the years the Mac spent wandering the desert. I read things like this and feel like - even if it was a net win - Apple's culture and identity really ended up losing something with his return.

linguae3• 1 year ago

I’m a big Steve Jobs fan, but I’m also a fan of what I call the “interregnum” years at Apple from 1985 through 1996. Yes, Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were not the greatest leaders, and Apple fumbled hard with Pink/Taligent, Copland, and hardware debacles such as the PowerBook 5300 and the Performa 5200/6200/5300/6300 series (1995 in particular was a disastrous year for Apple).

However, there were many wonderful things about this era. Jean Louis Gassée fought for expandable Macs, and his influence helped lead to the Macintosh II, which started a long series of expandable Macs that went unbroken until the “trash can” 2013 Mac Pro was released. System 7 might not have been the most reliable OS, but it had a wonderful UI. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini promoted solid UI/UX principles and guidelines. HyperCard is from this time period. Apple’s Advanced Technology Group with Larry Tesler, Alan Kay, and many others worked on very interesting projects such as the Dylan programming language and the SK8 environment. OpenDoc was an interesting attempt at making a component-based software platform.

There was also this cozy, whimsical feeling of the classic Mac OS that got lost during the transition to Mac OS X, though I’m greatly appreciative of Mac OS X.

I’m a fan of “interregnum” Apple and also 1997-2011 Apple when Steve Jobs returned, but I’m not much of a fan of Tim Cook’s Apple. This is when I felt Apple has changed dramatically from its roots. Apple is financially the most successful it’s ever been, but the Mac no longer has the same feeling it once had back in the 1990s or the 2000s. Apple has gone from the Mac company to the iPhone company now.

Hilift• 1 year ago

1985 Kinko's had a bank of Macs available for anyone to use. I used to go there late thinking it would be less busy but they were usually in use all the time.

fnord77• 1 year ago

Cook's apple is slowly turning into a services company. Services revenue is higher than mac + ipad revenue combined.

ilamont• 1 year ago

Wasn't Jony Ive also hired during the interregnum period? I think I remember reading in the Isaacson bio that when Jobs came back in the late 90s he encountered Ive who was hired a year or two previously.

poulsbohemian2• 1 year ago

hardware debacles such as the PowerBook 5300

I'm still twitching 30 years later... what a piece of shit mine was. Spent more time in AppleCare than in my possession being used.

poulsbohemian2• 1 year ago

There was also this cozy, whimsical feeling of the classic Mac OS that got lost during the transition to Mac OS X

Yes. It was so personal and so fun to be able to customize things like sounds and window colors, and to have Oscar the Grouch sing every time you emptied the trash. That whimsy and wonder is exactly what's missing in modern computing; the devices are more personal, yet more sterile.

p_ing• 1 year ago

That's really neat. Sometimes the how is better than the result.

...now do the Black Monolith.

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

I miss Easter Eggs so much. Let's bring them back.

reconnecting2• 1 year ago

We have the small one in FILE_ID.DIZ

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...

gaudystead• 1 year ago

Agreed. They might only be found in smaller projects these days, but I'd love to see them in larger efforts as well. As a kid, discovering/hearing about Easter eggs in a product tended to cause me use it more, if for no other reason than to find the Easter egg. It saddens me that hidden nuggets of joy aren't as popular as they used to be, with even the latest Android versions having very boring "Easter eggs" that amount to a disappointingly sparse interaction for users who have to unlock the developer features. :/

chrisbrandow• 1 year ago

Somebody once shared an Easter egg on an iPad, where they wrote a little code in the playground app and were able to pull up the next logo from the ROM, or something like that. I reproduced it at the time, but I’ve never been able to find a reference since. This was like 6 years ago or so

postexitus• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the "We made the Amiga, they f----d it up!" message.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...

jan_Sate• 1 year ago

Impressive. Interesting how it took that long until someone found the triggering mechanism of this easter egg. Reverse engineering is tough.

Now that I wonder where I could learn RE? Where do I even start? Got any recommendation of online tutorial or book or something?

coldpie• 1 year ago

Video games are a good place to start, especially for old consoles like the NES. The impacts of your experimenting are immediately visible, and they're simple devices (though the hardware "APIs" can be pretty unintuitive to a modern programmer), and there's a lot of tooling already built for hacking and reversing them. Try loading up your favorite NES game in Mesen and poke around its debugging tools with nesdev.org open in a browser. If the game you're working with has already been reversed by someone else, you may find some useful info on https://datacrystal.tcrf.net , too.

Reversing more modern software is tricky. I wrote a couple articles a while back about hacking a Gamecube game that you might enjoy:

https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...

https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/02/28/hacking-super-monk...

Accompanying HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315368

bbayles• 1 year ago

Agree on video games! I recently found a "developer photo insert" Easter egg in an old 3DO game: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-ecl...

enoent• 1 year ago

Without discrediting the author, as it's always cool to share these findings, was anyone actively looking for this over 27 years?

A lot of the times, it just happens that someone was the first person that even bothered trying digging into the code. Specially after decompilation became much more accessible for less popular architectures with Ghidra. Give it a try, there's plenty of low hanging fruit! I've submitted another case some time ago.

Also luckily, considering other OS easter eggs, it doesn't seem like there was any obfuscation involved, like "chained xor stored in bitmap resource of badly supported executable format": https://x.com/mswin_bat/status/1504788425525719043

MortyWaves• 1 year ago

It's really bugging me that he somehow reads "The Team" but not the full string "The Team Break at Event Match - Native" whatever that means.

pimlottc• 1 year ago

These are two separate strings. You can see in the hexdump that the character between them is not a space (0x20) but an unprintable control character (0x1D). The article refers to these as "Pascal strings". Unlike C-style strings, they are not null-terminated, but instead are length-prefixed [0]; the first byte of the string stores the length of the string.

So you can see that "The Team" is indeed a single string, starting with the length of 8 (encoded as 0x08), followed by the string "Break at Event Match - Native" with length of 29 (encoded as 0x1D)

0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-pascal...

butlike• 1 year ago

'The Team' is the file that's exposed on the ROM disk when you successfully execute the easter egg.

tambourine_man• 1 year ago

This is awesome. There’s something about these old machines that inspire both the creation and discovery of Easter Eggs.

I doubt there will be anyone digging through the EFI or whatever of a MacBook Air in 30 years. If there’s even something there to be found.

dylan6044• 1 year ago

If there’s even something there to be found.

But that's the thing right there. We won't know until someone does the search.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

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.

ulfw• 1 year ago

I don't know what your odd issue with product people is but this has absolutely nothing to do with Product (management). Software used to be done by a handful of people. Now there are thousands involved across an organisation. For better or worth that's how it is. An Easter Egg highlighting just a few people just doesn't make sense for a large software project nowadays

rusk• 1 year ago

It’s more to do with Quality Control than Product Management

zzrrt• 1 year ago

Now there are thousands involved across an organisation… An Easter Egg highlighting just a few people just doesn't make sense

I don’t know if the message was edited, but GP addressed this with “Maybe… it shows me a few people at random who played a role in development.” Anyway, you could also show thousands of names/faces rapidly but still meaningfully, or let the user explore them slowly. Feels like the other responses are more accurate than it simply being about the quantity of people.

jibal• 1 year ago

For better or worse

hinkley6• 1 year ago

I wonder too if there was more of this before Agile. With deadline driven development you can run into situations where part of the team is stuck waiting for their teammates to finish something so they can surpass a milestone. You can only poke at the backlog so much. Boredom and being able to rationalize that you aren't really affecting the roadmap by sneaking a little extra something in makes for a lot more 'motive and opportunity' situations.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

Today some auditor (like me) would fail your ITGCs because of the undocumented partition/file/change/etc (take your pick) and force you to submit a deviation to the SOC team, ask you to "review and update the Secure Design Document to reflect to the change", ask you to create a Jira and/or ServiceNow ticket, etc. etc. etc.

Oh, and you would get a red mark on your "HR P&D record" for the 'Secure Software Policy' violation.

(Shit.. I hated myself writing the above, but it's true)

In 2001 though, we would all laugh if we would have 'caught' the devs doing something cool like this!

dclowd99012• 1 year ago

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%.

indrora2• 1 year ago

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

out-of-ideas• 1 year ago

I feel like we're constantly at 120%

sounds like a great way to burn out. if you do not take care of yourself properly, how are you expected to take care of anything else?

edit: oops late reply, but oh well

WesolyKubeczek• 1 year ago

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.

Be careful what you wish for, lest a special hotkey on a new Mac brings up a fullscreen portrait of Craig Federighi in his full mighty hairy-chested glory with “infinite” zoom into the chest (available as a 5GB download).

perdomon2• 1 year ago

I couldn't reproduce this using the Infinite Mac browser tool shared in the article on Firefox, but it's a really cool find regardless. I wonder if Apple today would dare to include anything remotely this fun.

teejmya• 1 year ago

FWIW, I got it on the second try using Firefox.

perdomon2• 1 year ago

I get to the part where I type in the file name, but the 'computer' restarts when I get like 3 letters in. Maybe there's a shortcut key associated with the restart function? No idea. Really cool emulator, though!

tasty_freeze• 1 year ago

I used to work with a guy who was at apple in the 80s into the mid 90s doing ASIC and board design. One time he mentioned being pissed that with all the blood, sweat, and tears the hardware team put into the design and debug of the hardware system, the software guys would blow 50K of ROM (or whatever) image glorifying the team that designed the computer ... completely leaving out the hardware team.

spaceisballer• 1 year ago

I have memories of going to the library in the 90s to read MacWorld. Then learning that if I did a few clicks and maybe keystrokes you may unlock something with the processor. I can’t totally recall what it would unlock but it was for the Apple IIci and it’s 33mhz processor.

amatecha• 1 year ago

My favorite was dragging a text clipping of "secret about box" to the desktop in System 7.5 and it would spawn a breakout game with the dev team's names as "bricks" :) fun times.

JeremyHerrman• 1 year ago

Set the monitor to color and the date to September 20th, 1989. Then boot while holding ⌘-⌥-C-I to see an image of the dev team.

https://compmuseum.org/blog/iici-easter-egg/

RainyDayTmrw• 1 year ago

I'm always fascinated by how small teams were in the earlier days of computing, and I wish we could somehow return to that.

smusamashah• 1 year ago

In the time of Windows 98 and XP, the Adobe photoshop and other many other software use to have easter egg in Help -> About screen. You open this dialog, press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + (Enter probably) and it use to roll credits very fast or show something else, jokes sometimes, or a different background animation. I distinctly remember it was more than just Adobe software that had these.

I use to try it in any tool tools I was playing around with (I use to try lots of software just to see what they do) and often found something here.

These stopped being a thing at some point and I eventually stopped looking for these.

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

Related Stories