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.
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.
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!
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%.
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]
> 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).
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
> 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.
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.
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:
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :/
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
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:
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
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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!
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
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
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).
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.
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.
- 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".
Note that this was in the aftermath of a summer with multiple major XP security issues.
There's a grain of truth to the grandparent comment but it is distorted by Occupy Wall Street ideology.
"... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple ..."
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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.
“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.
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!"
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?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/12/amiga-history-part-5...
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirren...
Now that I wonder where I could learn RE? Where do I even start? Got any recommendation of online tutorial or book or something?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.