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."

Decline of Easter Eggs

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

In the increasingly litigious world of software, it seemed like a lot of Easter eggs disappeared from operating systems and from business software. Software became professional and had less use for a sense of humor, undocumented code became a possible liability, and it seems to be looked upon a little more as having no place in the business world. Which is said, I think.

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[rhsanborn]

Let's even consider that they aren't malicious, but simply untested. It's a bunch of code that's possibly vulnerable to an exploit.

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[Darkness404]

...So? You take this risk anytime you use closed source software (or anytime you don't view the source of an open source software program, and your compiler, etc.)

How do you know your web browser right now doesn't have malware built in? After all, have you read the entire source for Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Internet Explorer/Opera for the exact version you are using?

Re:Decline of Easter Eggs

[geekoid]

Code is getting a lot more complex. When it's 4 people putting a game together? then you can stick an Easter egg and all laugh about it. when its 20 developers, 12 QA people, and a few million lines of code? it because an addition thing to manage.

TO answer your question:
I often out Easter eggs in my code, but I do most my work on my own.
Also, jokes.

Re:Research?

[Zadaz]

Christ, what an asshole.

Yes, this was known. But the process of pulling them off the ROMs yourself? Documenting the process? Yeah, no one was kind enough to wrap all that up in one place. It's a fun read and if you're not careful even you, Mighty Internet Commenter, might learn something.

Shut the hell up and contribute. Bitching gets no one anywhere.

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[BenJury]

It's a shame isn't it? We have to forgo these fun little tit-bits for these sorts of issues.

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[thorntonmark]

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/15/strange-loops-dennis-ritchie-a/ [scienceblogs.com]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion