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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."
Of course there are easter eggs stored in ROMs. You only need to look as far as to video games to find long rants hidden in there (just see http://www.bretz.ca/dave/tetrisrant.htm for an example)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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"
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.
If you have time for easter eggs, you clearly aren't coding hard enough; and if the product has space for easter eggs, we clearly haven't shaved the BOM hard enough!
I expect this nonsense to be gone in revision B, no matter how many nights and weekends it takes!
if the product has space for easter eggs, we clearly haven't shaved the BOM hard enough!
Say you have a program that fits in the first 412 KiB of a 512 KiB chip. No, it wouldn't be possible to trim that down to 256 KiB, the next smaller chip, on the provided budget. What else should the developers put into the unused space?
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'.
Backdoor and easter eggs are different things, and they have both always been around as long as computers have been around.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=13&article=925
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?
You are probably thinking of the Silicon Zoo. Fun site.