Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

Oh please.

It's unlikely Jobs, having returned to an Apple in crisis, personally knew about some obscure ROM image, its location buried in secret assembly code. More likely, one of those "real people" removed it doing some cleanup.

Jobs routinely and publicly spoke about the amazing people who work for Apple. He spoke with Walt Mossberg about how important it is to build a great team and foster creativity.

View on HN

Note that this was the last “OldWorld” Mac (at least desktop Mac, the WallStreet PowerBook G3 was probably a bit later) where the traditional Mac ROM was in an actual hardware ROM.

“NewWorld” started with the iMac: only Open Firmware was in ROM and the classic Mac OS ROM was just a file on disk.

When a HW/SW team is shipping a new Mac and burning a ROM, that feels like an occasion to put in a picture of the team. When you’re not burning a ROM and the picture would take up space on everyone’s disk…not so much.

how is taking up space on someone's HDD worse than taking up space in the very constrained ROM?

If you need 32K of ROM because your code is 26K, then that means you have 6K just available that no one will ever be able to access otherwise. Why not use it for an easter egg?

The physical ROM chip is a certain size. If you have 50kB left over, it doesn't matter if those bits are zeros or an easter egg.

and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin? it's 50K. nobody will ever notice

This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to boot in an emergency.

Not on a G3. These systems shipped with Mac OS 8; the System suitcase was over 6 MB alone. Apple stopped shipping systems with internal floppy drives altogether a few years later, with the iMac and blue-and-white G3.

You could absolutely boot a stripped-down Mac OS 8 on a floppy, including the beige G3. Apple even provided them ("Disk Tools").

Fascinatingly, the System file on the Disk Tools 8.1 floppy is actually a build of System 7, with HFS+ support grafted on.

https://github.com/elliotnunn/HFSPlusBackport/blob/master/re...

Apple even still hosts a download of the Disk Tools floppy for MacOS 8.1! https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...

didn't OS 8 come on a CD? I installed it from disc in my DVD drive. not sure how old you think the G3 is, but it's not as old as installing from floppy. just barely

That's meaningless, even coming out of Steve Jobs mouth. Every corporate executive publicly speaks about the "amazing people who work for them" and the "importance of building great teams and fostering creativity". Talk is cheap and projecting a corporate image is a core part of their job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com