> 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 )
Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon
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.
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: /earth1) 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.
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.
If the file had been corrupted, I wouldn't have found it as funny.
Our PCI compliance page is an easter egg:
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.
https://www.theregister.com/ have it for instance.
> 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.
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.
This used MrMacHook, IIRC.
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.
"How come we don't go out anymore"
"would you like to play a game?"
...