Engineer finds Easter egg in Apple Power Macintosh G3 after 27 years

After 27 years, a software engineer has decoded a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the ROM of the Power Mac G3: a hidden photo of the development team. The existence of the JPEG image had been documented by Pierre Dandumont in 2014, but its accessibility on the computer was a mystery until now.

The Easter Egg is a team photo

Engineer Doug Brown discovered the method for displaying the photo by accident while examining the resources in the ROM of a Power Mac G3 using a hex editor and a Mac ROM template. The ROM version was included in desktop, mini-tower and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 to 1999. Brown came across a resource called "HPOE", which contained the team photo, as well as unusual Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code, including ".Edisk", "secret ROM image" and "The Team".

These strings provided the decisive clue. After extracting and disassembling the code, Brown found that SCSI Manager was looking for a RAM disk volume called "secret ROM image". When this was found, the code created a file called "The Team" that contained the hidden JPEG data.

How Doug Brown found the team photo

The procedure in brief: Accessing the Easter egg requires the user to activate the RAM disk in the Storage Control Panel, reboot, select the RAM disk icon, select "Erase volume" from the special menu, and enter "secret ROM image" in the formatting dialog box. Double-clicking on the resulting file, "The Team," opens it in SimpleText and displays the hidden image. Doug Brown also explains exactly how to do this on his website.

This discovery is considered one of the last undiscovered Easter eggs from the era before Steve Jobs' return to Apple. The Easter egg works up to Mac OS 9.0.4, but appears to have been disabled with version 9.1, which is consistent with Jobs' reported ban on Easter eggs upon his return in 1997. However, it remains unclear whether Jobs knew about this particular secret. Those who prefer a new iMac can find one at Amazon, among other places.