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Also interesting about this story is that maybe this is how Susan Kare started working on the Mac?
> I also asked my high school friend Susan Kare, who hadn't started with Apple yet, to try to draw some Mr. Macintosh animations.
(For those who haven't yet seen it, here's a video of Susan Kare introducing contemporaraneous influencers to the Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso )
The artist, Folon, also made this gorgeous close-down animation for French TV channel Antenne 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t...
Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon
And here is Mr. Macintosh, himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:...
Tracking-free YouTube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI
Sort of like a reverse Clippy, which you do find easily and wish you wouldn't.
Generally speaking, programs used to have more Easter eggs. I can't recall a single one in the cloud era. The only one remotely whimsical is PostHog.
> Generally speaking, programs used to have more Easter eggs. I can't recall a single one in the cloud era.
The problem with Easter Eggs in the web era is that as soon as one person finds it, everyone knows about it. Part of the fun in the boxed software era was that you either had to find it yourself or hear about it from a friend.
That being said, we did have an easter egg on reddit for a long time that very few people noticed. Robots.txt included this:
User-Agent: bender
Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
User-Agent: Gort
Disallow: /earthSometime in the early 2010s there was a link to a livestream of an office fish tank (I think) in the site footer, but I can't find any mention of it online.
Ms. Splashy Pants! I have her tank here under my desk at this very moment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8y7bc/what_happe...
The lack of Easter eggs in programs I feel like is a combination of 3 things
1) more “professionalism” being expected in software. Computers aren’t quirky things anymore they’re “serious business” and “serious businesses don’t do quirky”. Or some other such nonsense.
2) Offense risk, something innocuous has serious potential to be taken wrong now or even at some future date. I worked on a system where we needed to impose some effectively arbitrary max limit on the number of items allowed to be configured. We eventually settled on “640k” and originally had an error if you exceed that that said “640k ought to be enough for anyone”. The devs who would have seen that message would have gotten the reference and hopefully had a good chuckle. But I’ve seen customers get short about innocuous jokes before and could easily have seen someone complaining that we weren’t taking their needs seriously.
3) Security liability. A lot of Easter eggs were distinct code paths or sometimes even entire tiny embedded applications. In an ever connected world where your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database, any unnecessary code path is also a potential security hole and risk. No one really wants to be in the news because a cute joke their developers put in 4 years ago was the key to a massive exploit.
Still I do agree that I miss some the “personality” older software could have.
To point 2, even regular user interface can be hazardous: https://www.folklore.org/Do_It.html
Given that (I think?) the "OK/Cancel" dialog of the original Mac is one of those 'foundational' UI conventions that was copied pretty directly by every GUI that came after it, I am very curious if our world wouldn't be full of "Do It" buttons if this episode hadn't taken place. Even the Start Menu could have been called the "Do" menu in that alternate universe.
Interestingly, Apple's HIG generally suggest avoiding "Ok" in favor of an action describing what will happen. So save dialogs say "Save" not "OK". The empty trash dialog says "Empty Trash". Still I guess that's more clear than "Do It"
This change most likely happened sometime in the early 1990s, though it’s possible it could’ve happened in the late 1980s. I have a PDF copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1995 that recommends descriptive button text instead of “OK” and “Cancel.”
A LucasArts game called Day of the Tentacle famously contained the entirety of its predecessor, Maniac Mansion.
I remember FoxPro 2.5 said, "Better call MAACO, you just crashed!" in some circumstance. Thankfully that seemed to improve with resetting the computer the time I saw it.
If the file had been corrupted, I wouldn't have found it as funny.
"your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database."
That is not the way it works now. The standard is 4 levels of encryption, most have 8. Multiple sign-offs for every single code change.
Your credit card terminal is a gateway to the signtors transaction database, last transaction, balance, current transaction. Every single code path is mapped out meticulously, at least on the most popular ones, and crypto keys are not padded like the very cheap ones.
Google products have tended to have a few, I remember a few amusing /commands in google chat, and there's a fair few in their search still.
"I can't recall a single one in the cloud era ..."
Our PCI compliance page is an easter egg:
I envy you having written this, because I've wanted to do the same. I'm the adhoc IT guy / CISO / etc. for a small medical practice. I have to jump through the PCI hoops quarterly because it's an ancient junk relic of a time where Infinite Trust Networking and monthly forced password rotation were en vogue.
And why do I have to do PCI stuff? Because we have a credit card scanner that patients use to pay for things. In any sane world, compliance would be on the manufacturer of the scanner: "hey, make devices that actually, you know, encrypt stuff reliably". But since we don't live in that world, I have to have a separate Ethernet drop to the card scanner, which plugs into its own dedicated port on the firewall, which completely segregates it from the rest of the LAN traffic. That isn't horrible in concept, but why? Our servers which store PHI don't have those stringent requirements, because the servers are secured. They don't have to trust that the network is kind and gentle, because they're designed with the idea that it's not. But not so the credit card scanner!
For extra fun, we also have to pay someone to run a PCI compliance scan against our external IP. Said IP listens on exactly one port: the one that doctors use to VPN into the office so that they can check their schedule from home. We got a failing score one year because the VPN appliance supported — not required, but supported — some less-than-perfect crypto algorithm. None of our clients were configured to use those protocols. I know. I configured them. But because the server supported them, we were temporarily[0] judged to be noncompliant because some attacker could, I don't know, hack in and pivot in to the firewall appliance and from their pivot to attack the poor downtrodden credit card scanner which, of course, can't be expected to defend itself from the hostile environment of doctor's office LAN.
PCI's a joke.
[0]It would be against the scanner's ToS to temporarily block that port in our inbound firewall long enough to get them to shut up about it, so I totally did not do that.
I'd much rather have Clippy than the forced AI shit that's everywhere nowadays
I feel that GNU Terry Pratchett is a cute little harmless easter egg that can be easily implemented: https://gnuterrypratchett.com/
https://www.theregister.com/ have it for instance.
Discord has lots of Easter eggs, presumably because of its gaming origins.
Fail Whale and other 404 messages were decent examples.
The Dogs of Amazon are still a thing. I saw one a few weeks ago.
I know MS put the kibosh on most easter eggs after some "trustworthy software" initiative in the early 2000s, which I think was to assuage government concerns that they could also be sneaking malicious backdoors into their software (silly reasoning), or that there could be vulnerabilities caused by an easter egg (ehhh...maybe).
They're security issues, that's why. Microsoft used to have fun ones in Windows and Office (including a Doom-like engine in Excel 95) but in the late 90s or early 2000s they were all taken out by corporate fiat, because they don't add value and may contain security vulnerabilities. Since then, Easter eggs in user-facing software were rare (except for maybe Google Search's "do a barrel roll" and that).
Texaco Towers was an Apple office above a Texaco gas station: https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html
Strictly speaking, it was a two-story building behind the Texaco station:
> There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers".
I also enjoyed the reference to Cicero's Pizza:
> Burell and I [Andy] liked to have lunch at Cicero's Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant that was just across the street. They had a Defender video game, which we'd play while waiting for our order. We'd also go to Cicero's around 4pm almost every day for another round of Defender playing; Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (see Make a Mess, Clean it Up!).
Now I get to admit my age. When I worked at Tymshare in the 1970s, we often went there when it was still named Coppola's Pizza.
It had previously been part of the Pee Wee's Pizza chain founded by Albert "Pee Wee" Proietti and Nunzio "Spike" Spacone. The Cupertino location was sold to Carmen and Palma Coppola, who named it Coppola's. They in turn sold it to their mother and father-in-law, Angelina and Nunzio Cicero. (Yes, another Nunzio.)
Nunzio Cicero kept the Coppola's name out of respect to Angelina's family name, and only after she passed in 1973 he named it after himself.
Cicero's Pizza moved a couple of times after that and is still in business on Bollinger Road in Cupertino.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634...
One fun thing about Coppola's/Cicero's is that they brought out the sliced pizza on a big round tray, but did not give out individual plates. Instead, you put a few napkins on the table and that was your plate!
As you can imagine, the tables got a fine layer of pizza grease over time.
Another Cupertino landmark around the corner from Coppola's/Cicero's was the R. Cali Brothers Mill on Stevens Creek. This was a huge animal feed mill and drive-through store. The front entrance sign said: “R. Cali & Bro. — Cupertino Feed Store, Ranch Spray Service, General Truck Hauling, Wood • Coal, Hay • Grain.”
You could drive your truck through to load it up with farm supplies, or take your car through as I did to get dog food.
And the baby food jars of Parmersan and chili flakes, with nail holes poked in the lid.
Tymshare! What kind of work did you do for them?
Programming of various sorts, mostly on the PDP-10, XDS Sigma 7, Datapoint 2200, and TI 990.
I'm out of time for today, but if you have HN Replies, I will drop you another reply later this week with some details.
It is fun to read these small stories about Mac OS/Apple. I think for Windows world we have https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin... Not sure if other OS are covered in such a "storyful" ways or have tidbits like this?
He lives inside of http://mrmacintosh.com , too (I use this site to download official Mac OS updates for stand-alone installations).
The idea of getting Mr Macintosh instead of a menu occasionally would be UX nightmare. But there could be other cute places to include it, like occasionally it's present inside About My Mac or whatever.
I remember reading this years ago and hoped a retro programmer would create a rom patch to implement this functionality. Maybe someday.
Toasty! -- Dan Forden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose
This used MrMacHook, IIRC.
I think Mr. Macintosh should have vaguely resembled Jef Raskin...
I bring this story up all the time. It's tragic that it was never implemented! I know you could read it as a story about CEO capriciousness, but to me it highlights how far Steve was willing to go to make the Mac playful and enjoyable. Back then, even the idea of dragging a file into a little trashcan was delightful.
they could’ve implemented it in the 128k rom but I think jobs was gone by then
Imagine the rumors that a remnant of Steve still lived on in the Mac, via some as yet unidentified unremoved OS code.
Steve lived on for quite some time in an undocumented key command you could use in the Finder. I forget the exact sequence; ctl-alt-cmd-shift space or something. It has become more broken over releases and may be gone now. We added it to make all animations go very slow. We would invoke it at Steve’s request in demo to him and he would open and close windows, show and hide sidebars, enter and exit TimeMachine and more. This shipped in numerous version of OSX.
Sorry for my nonsense...I always get excited when I saw a post about a classic/PowerPC Macintosh (I don't like the colorful ones, though).
I have never owned, used, or seen other people used one in real life. I have only seen them in YouTube videos and in articles such as this one. I don't know why I'm so excited about these cuboid machines.
I need to grab an emulator and install some toolchain to work on it.
Just visit Infinite Mac and use them in your browser:
Thanks, I used it a few times but not sure how good it persists data -- I guess it's fine since it gives users some extra space. This is a good option for exploration.
They use local storage for persistence, and a bunch of other really neat tricks, like being able to upload zip files to get files into the emulated universe without mucking about with weird disk images and things.
I wouldn't have liked this. I don't want any part of my computer to be eerie or mysterious. I also don't want there to be anything romantic or mysterious about my bank account.
If this had been deployed and its existence has been widely publicized and described right after its deployment (which seems likely to me even if Apple tried to suppress it) the only deleterious effect on me would have been my wasting a little time learning about it. If I got glimpses of Mr Macintosh before news about its existence had reached me, the effect on me would have probably been much worse.
I'm a huge fan of the Mac and of the research and development which led to it at Doug Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, then at Xerox PARC, then at Apple.
definitely seems like some people would have perceived it as a virus having infected their computer, although 1984 was pretty early for virii
This was definitely the "no arrow keys because we have a mouse" era of Apple. Everything we take for granted today was still in flux, and I can certainly imagine that even by the Macintosh 512k, just enough dust had settled that Jobs had reconsidered the idea of intentionally non-deterministic OS behavior.
True, after enough floppy swaps, your Mac probably was doing something like this. Hopefully removed the next time Disinfectant was run.
If you wanted safe and predictable you could buy an IBM PC. Apple was trying to be something different.
Crafted by Rajat
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