Revisiting the Macintosh ROM Easter Egg

eldavojohn writes "NYCResistor has published photos of what they call 'Ghosts in the ROM' after dumping Apple Mac SE ROM images from a roadside Motorola 68000-era Macintosh and looking at all the data (they mention an Easter egg reference to this from 1999). They go into some nice detail about the strategy for extracting this data from a discarded unit and noticing structure. There's also other data that they weren't able to identify, which causes one to wonder how many other Easter eggs are lying about in various ROM chips and what modern Easter eggs must be shipping with software/hardware today."

Re:Chips come in power of 2 sizes

[tepples]

A compression routine that would allow the machine code to fit in the 256kb to begin with?

The ROMs of old world Macs were execute-in-place [wikipedia.org], meaning they didn't need to be copied to RAM first. Adding compression would require 412 KiB of RAM to hold the decompressed machine code. At the time, that was considered a huge chunk of RAM for a computer like the Mac.

Re:Long long ago

[hey0you0guy]

http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=13&article=925 [apologeticspress.org]

Re:Apple ][ easter egg

[AttyBobDobalina]

Could this be what you are recalling? http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt&characters=Steve%20Capps&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=high&showcomments=1 [folklore.org]

Re:we made it, commodore f*cked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's genuine and in Workbench 1.2. [amigahistory.co.uk]

LShift-RShift-LAlt-RAlt-ejectdisk-F1 prints "The Amiga, Born a Champion"

LShift-RShift-LAlt-RAlt-insertdisk-F1 prints "We made Amiga, They fucked it up"

In Workbench 1.3, Commodore changed the latter message to "Still a Champion"

Re:lots of chips had images on them

[gasmasher]

You are probably thinking of the Silicon Zoo [fsu.edu]. Fun site.

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[Luyseyal]

How about an entire flight simulator [wikipedia.org] easter egg?

-l

Re:Apple ][ easter egg

[tlhIngan]

I heard a rumor, I'm not sure if it was urban legend or real, that some company pirated apple's rom into their apple 2 clone and it went to court. And in court, they had brought in a clone computer that was "not infringing" and the prosecution asked them to type "VERIFY" and hit return. The message that displayed on their machine closed the case.

Anyone know if that really happened?

It's true, but not quite that cut-and-dried.

It was Apple Computer v. Franklin Computer [wikipedia.org] (yes the Franklin of "spelling ace" and other handheld device fame).

Basically, because the Apple II schematics were in the box, Franklin claimed they could build a clone and use Apple's software, which existed only as machine-readable binary (the copyright of which was unknown). That one case basically locked down the status of object code being copyrightable.

Bell and Howell [wikipedia.org] however obtained a license from Apple to clone it.