Secret hidden picture of computer’s engineering team revealed

The key picture of the staff that labored on the Energy Macintosh G3. Picture credit score: Doug Brown

A self-described pc geek has revealed a beforehand secret “easter egg” picture file buried within the ROM code of the 27-year-old Energy Macintosh G3 that exhibits the staff that labored on the venture.

Doug Brown, who maintains a weblog that paperwork his experiments and analysis into older computer systems, mentioned that he accidentally discovered the Easter egg whereas trying by sources within the Energy Mac G3’s ROM. This mannequin was made by Apple between November 1997 and August 1999.

The identical ROM was used for the minitower, all-in-one, and beige desktop fashions. Brown mentioned he was spending “a lazy Sunday” utilizing a pair of instruments known as ROM Fiend and Hex Fiend to look by the G3’s ROM sources.

He shortly noticed two undocumented anomalies. The primary was a useful resource of sort HPOE that contained a JPEG picture. This had been documented in 2014 by one other ROM researcher, Pierre Dandumont — however that discovery didn’t reveal what the JPEG file would present if extracted.

The second, found by Brown, was a nitt useful resource with ID 43, named “Native 4.3.” This turned out to be the PowerPC-native SCSI Supervisor 4.3 code. The SCSI supervisor was anticipated and routine, however Brown observed on the very finish of the info some sudden Pascal strings.

The strings made reference to “.Edisk,” “secret ROM picture,” and “The Staff.” Brown wrote that “the “secret ROM picture” textual content specifically appeared prefer it might be associated to the image Dandumont had uncovered, however was unable to disclose.

“Some fast Web looking for the phrase ‘secret ROM picture’ revealed that it had been used for Easter eggs with earlier PowerPC Macs,” Brown famous. “On these machines, you simply needed to sort the textual content, choose it, and drag it to the desktop. Then, the image would seem.”

Nonetheless, that method did not work with the key G3 picture. Brown then fed the extracted file into Ghidra, a framework for software program reverse engineering. After analyzing the code twice, Ghidra was capable of uncover an e-disk driver, which might create a RAM disk.

From code to image

It remained a thriller as to the way to get the buried and secret image to show. A collaborator who was following Brown’s discovery and operating a browser-based emulator instrument known as Infinite Mac got here up with the reply: create and format the RAM disk, and provides it the title of “secret ROM picture.”

This creates a RAM disk that accommodates a single file: a textual content file known as “The Staff.” Double-clicking the file opens SimpleText, which shows the picture. Since then, numerous Apple staff footage have been found in different fashions from that period.

Brown’s submit on the invention led to a remark by one of many individuals pictured within the first of the key photos, Invoice Saperstein. He’s seen because the fourth particular person from the left within the second row.

“This resulted from an Easter egg within the unique PowerMac that contained Paula Abdul (with out permissions, in fact),” Saperstein famous.

The staff opted to place an image of themselves within the ROM of the G3, “however we needed to hold it very secret,” he added. Steve Jobs apparently ended the observe when he returned to the corporate in 1997.