My favorite one is the story of an engineer who hid an image of Paula Abdul on a CD-ROM (another version I heard was a ROM chip) without anyone’s knowledge. When the image was finally discovered production had already begun, making for a very expensive Easter egg to remove.
I don't remember how I learned it, but back when my family had a IIci I remember there was a startup key command you could press to display an image of the developers in the ROM. I kind of miss the days when that sort of thing was done.
On the Sega Master System there was an entire game in the ROM -- Snail Maze (the walls and floor reminiscent of the company's logo). Pressing up-left and both buttons while turning on the console with no cartridge in the slot would start the game.
On the Macintosh Classic, there's a whole OS boot disk image in ROM that can be activated by booting with the keys "command option X O" held down (X-O was the code name for the machine). These are the remains of a prototype for making a diskless terminal Macintosh. It comes in handy if you've hosed your boot disk somehow.
As a kid I didn't have Internet yet, but somehow had a CoCo3. Many times I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Reset and wondered what was the purpose of this image, I even made a BASIC program to dump it on tape from the ROM. Didn't learn the answer to that mystery for many years.
I checked out the comments where some of the original engineers who put this into the ROM commented. Right smack in the middle is a comment from Terry A Davis as well. Damn.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 82.2 ms ] threadhttps://archive.org/details/SWIMDesignDocs/IOP%20serial%20dr...
>https://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/com...
>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/122367?sortBy=best
"Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory!"
System 7.1: "Help! Help! We're still being held prisoner in a system software factory!"
System 7.5: "Help! Help! He's STILL being held prisoner in a system software factory!"
System 7.5.3: "Mercenaries hit the software factory and freed the prisoners."
My favorite one is the story of an engineer who hid an image of Paula Abdul on a CD-ROM (another version I heard was a ROM chip) without anyone’s knowledge. When the image was finally discovered production had already begun, making for a very expensive Easter egg to remove.
Ghosts in the rom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416032 - Aug 2012 (22 comments)
As early as 2012 he was sharing the gospel of what was to become TempleOS.