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:Easter Egg/spyware

[wiedzmin]

ikr. a little while ago there was an easter egg of a hardcoded admin username and password in some HP hardware... recently there's an easter egg of some hardcoded keys... fun fun fun.

Re:Of course...

[cpu6502]

My first easter egg was in the old Atari console game "Adventure". If you found a hidden room and carried a magic one-pixel sprite (dot) into that room, it displayed the name of the programmer.

Of course once Atari learned about it they had a fit because they wanted programmers to remain anonymous, and that's one of the reasons four programmers quit Atari and founded Activision. They wanted name credit for their artistic creations.

we made it, commodore f*cked it up

[cathector]

my favorite easter egg was in the early amiga 'rom' (kickstart) -
if you held down both shift keys, both ctrl keys, one of the function keys, then inserted a floppy disk,
the screen would briefly flash "the amiga - we made it, commodore fucked it up'.

Apple ][ easter egg

[v1]

I recall on my //c I could type "VERIFY" (with no filename, or with no DOS booted) and it would return

COPYRIGHT (C) 1984 APPLE COMPUTER (beep!)

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?

Re:Research?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The comments at TFA point out how you know you're old when your common knowledge is someone else's hacker archaeological project.

Isaac Asimov's prediction in Foundation may prove true -- in there scientists (at least 30 kiloyears in the future) argue about the validiy of the "millenial depth" theory, that you only needed to delve into the past 1000 years of history or science papers, and that if it wasn't talked about there, it wouldn't be any further back.

As to the hidden malware issue, read the prologue of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. It's readable on Amazon (except page 4 for some odd reason). There's some, literally, galactic-class malware hidden in static data.

Re:Apple ][ easter egg

[Dwedit]

Tried that on an emulator in several different modes.
Nothing but "?SYNTAX ERROR"s all around.
Do you have any evidence that this command is real?

I'll admit to mine...

[respice]

I'm a tech writer, and years ago, on a project, I had a dialog box in a project that had a bunch of tabs. In the help, I put screenshots of each tab. If you were looking at the help for tab "A" and clicked on tab "B," "C," D," etc. in the project, the help for that page would come up, and the screenshots were aligned with one another. Anyway, if you clicked the "Help" button in the screenshot on one and only one of the tabs (in the help, mind you), we jumped to a new page with a picture of the entire doc team and our names. The head of the doc team knew - he was even in the picture - but I don't think anyone else in management knew. There was one SE who knew, and she used to demonstrate it for easily-amused customers.

Now who else will admit to their Easter Eggs?

Re:Easter Egg/spyware

[firewrought]

One man's easter egg can easily be another man's malware. This sounds kind of cool, until you realise there could be any number of malicious "easter eggs".

Um, no. Easter eggs and malware are completely separate camps. By the time you hit upon an easter egg, you've already committed to trusting a progammer's intentions and work quality. Discovering he or she has a sense of humor too does not cause injury to you. By the same token, a virus is a virus, even if it plays a cute animation [wikipedia.org].

While you imply that we should regard easter eggs with a certain suspicion, I gather what's really making you uncomfortable is the fact that there's hidden functionality in that binary you're running. Guess what... easter eggs or not, most software is loaded with hidden functionality: easter eggs, diagnostic functions, test code, old screens, unused modules, compatibility modes, experimental features, platform-specific and customer-specific hacks, and, yes, sometimes malware. Easter eggs have merely made you reexamine some false assumptions you had.