Ghosts in the ROM (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Ghosts in the ROM (2012)

nycresistor.com

155 pointsgelstudios23 comments

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.

Wow. I didn't know he died in 2018 either. Always thought he was from pre-2000s, maybe it's because I thought nobody can create an OS this recently.

That's why people found his work so amazing.

Surreal indeed. Here he is: https://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/com...

As early as 2012 he was sharing the gospel of what was to become TempleOS.

Terry Davis is an easter egg by himself.

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.

similar on my childhood radio shack computer - https://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/CoCo3_Easter_Egg

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.

Computers were still something special back then. I miss that too.

In the Commodore Amiga you can turn off and on the power light. Weird for these times.

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.

That is because the power indicator LED also serves as an indicator of the audio low-pass filter. Rather quirky, yes.

Lots of great 90s Apple Easter Eggs are listed here (the PDF): https://www.macintoshrepository.org/226-apple-easter-eggs

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 think perhaps the best side effect of the OSS movement is that software developers now are more likely to consider the impact of licensing.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Ghosts in the rom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416032 - Aug 2012 (22 comments)

The resource type 'SERD' is a driver for the SCC IO processor.

https://archive.org/details/SWIMDesignDocs/IOP%20serial%20dr...

This brings back fond memories of the various Blue Meanies easter eggs in System 7.0.1 on my first Mac (actually my dad's LC).

"Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory!"

System 7.0: "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."

!ɿɘƨwoɿd dɘw ɒ ni bɘnoƨiɿqmi nɘɘd ɘv'I !qlɘH

I always got a chuckle out of the guy in sunglasses in the second image. It looks like it was hand-edited to make the shades completely black.

So uhhh... does anyone know all the people? I'd love to know each person's nane.

Some links in the comments from ex-engineers and people who knew about the easter egg apparently documented for over a decade when this was published.

>https://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/com...

>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/122367?sortBy=best

Reply on news.ycombinator.com