In eWorld's Town Square window, if you click in the
extreme upper-left hand corner, it changes to a night
scene. This works for version 1.1 and possibly other
versions. Sadly though, after April 1st this easter egg
was put to rest with eWorld's end. I guess it would be
too much to ask for a moment of silence. Oh well...
Apple's Silicon Valley (Finder)
System 7 Finder Code Name: Furnishings 2000 (a defunct Bay Area furniture store)
This is the most famous, and probably the oldest easter egg released by Apple.
When holding down the Option key while in the Finder go up to what would normally be “About This Macintosh...” in the Apple Menu. Instead it will say “About The Finder...”. Click on that and you will see a picture; after a while it will give a list of credits at the bottom. If the finder is past version 7.0, and the creation date of the invincible “Desktop Folder” is May 13, 1991 or later, it will have credits for all of those who created the Finder from the Lisa on. If Balloon Help is turned on, the drop-menu says "Displays a dialog with the original Finder picture." By holding down Command and Option you will see a wacky cursor. The balck and white picture is of Silicon Valley. It is the original picture from System 1.0.
Ô£øApple believed MacOS8 was the greatest thing to happen since 1984. The black and white Silicon Valley was from 1984. Thinking out with the old, in with new, MacOS8 engineers made a brand new Silicon Valley. You will notice that at the end of the credits, after the Special Thanks, the employess who lost their jobs after the restructuring are listed.
Never To Be
Provided by Jack Frost (jfrost@crl.com)
This picture you see below was going to replace the current black and white Silicon Valley, descrided above, in Copland. It looks excellent in thousands or millions of colors. I was only able to put in here at 256 because of the space it took up. It was never put in and was traded for the picture you see now in MacOS8.
 
 
Animal Crackers
Adam Lang (thalen@cs.pdx.edu) sent me a letter saying that
supposedly there was going to be a QuickTime movie addition to the "About the Finder..." window. It was going to be part of the ROMs of the Macs around the time System 7 was developed. You'd have to hold down something like D and C when you selected "About the finder...". It then took the landscape under "About the finder..." and would zoom back
away from it until you discover what it really is: the back of a giant
dogcow! Then the credits roll...
Sadly though, there wasn't space to put it into the ROMs. Ô£øOn the brighter side of things, there is an extention which patches your System that has the DogCow movie and will run the egg. The extension, "Clarus-The Tail Patch", was made in 1991 by David Ewing and Tim Senecal.
Joy!
From: Alex Morando (AMORAN@aol.com)
I have found that "Joy" it is used by the Code Fragment Manager to determine that subsequent data is PowerPC code.
If you open most native/fat applications using a text editor, you will see "Joy!" at the beginning of the data fork.
Mood Swings
From: Michael Ring (MRING101@aol.com)
After restarting and holding down the Apple-Option keys to rebuild your desktop you will see the "Are you sure you want to rebuild your desktop?" window pop up. Before clicking "Cancel" let's do a little exploring...
Under the Apple menu (it will be greyed), there is simple a lowercase "p". Heading over to the Edit menu we will find an "m" at the very bottom of the window. And finally, our travels bring us to an "s"in the Special menu. The problem with acronyms is that they can mean so many different things...
Also, In the Labels menu beside each color is a single letter. Those letters spell out "alanjef" vertically. To get more info. on this go to "Labels" in the Control Panels chapter.
Recurring Oddities
The following icons can be found in the resources of many things. The coffee cup was taken out of the ROM of a Performa 6115 (using ROMmie), the QuickTime extension, and the System File. All of these can be found in the Systems and ROMs of most computers under the same ID's in the ICON resource. To clear things up, there is a hardware component known as the mixer, and if you take a look at "System Resources", in the chapter "Current System Eggs", you will see a reference to the fridge. Also, in that chapter, under "Also Appearing...", is a reference to the sifter.
   
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Ô£øI received this explanation of the odd icons and terms seen above and in the "Current System Eggs" chapter from Mac from Scott L. Barber (serker@dialnet.net):
There is a definite link between the icons and "what Jim Reekes thinks
of Apple Hardware". When apple machines roll off of the production
lines, the hardware diagnostics are tested with whatever version of the
system software is linked to the ROM (7.5.2 for the new machines).
During this process, if one of the chips fail during the process the
system actually throws up a dialog box with the picture of the fridge
and the error "-6580: This is glue between..."
You have to understand, with each production model, the engineered area
on the motherboards changes, as well as the type or manufacturer of the
chips themselves. With all these changes, one thing remains the
same - the process by which the system calls this hardware.
Troubleshooting production models is much easier to do if the engineers
know the problem is with the AWACS chip or the ASC chip, but throwing up
a dialog that says "Error -6583 Sound Not Initialized" just doesn't help crews
discover the problem quickly, or even help to troubleshoot which chip or
board trace is affected. At least this way, with the pictures, the error code
explains not only that the ASC chip is down, but that the error may be occuring
AROUND the ASC chip instead of within the sound components themselves.
This is an example of a more intelligent human interface for diagnostics.
Now, following apple human interface guidelines, all dialog boxes must
have icons (at least, if you get sarcastically technical enough about
it, you can justify it) so they made icons to comply with guidelines.
My guess is that it's easier for employees to sort motherboard problems
during mass assembly by dialog icon if there is an error. But you will
notice that none of the resource icons are in color, or have extremely high
definitions - they're just 1-bit icons. This cuts down on size, and gets
straight to the point.
Jim Reekes was one of the engineers (sound of course) that actually
made it to the production levels, and sat around explaining how
the hardware worked by using analogies. As with all internal codes at
Apple - his explanations caught on within the division, and the joke was
expanded into an 'easier to use diagnostic interface' (which has of
course been expanded by apple to include coffee cups, butter knives,
among other things).
Unique Alias Error Message
Set the Alias flag and unset the Inited flag of a program (which is not an alias). Do this with ResEdit when you get info. for the program, whatever it may be. The result is a unique message about the problem. I included this because it is one of the few errors that is a bit odd saying “oops!”. It is also very hard to trigger without ResEdit.
