Easter eggs are part of the tradition of this time of year, and the term applied to concealed features in computer hardware or software. It seems to have originated in early video games, although the first record is in the command make love on DEC PDP-10 mainframes in 1967-68. Macs have had their fair share over the years, although Steve Jobs seems to have disliked them, and is reported to have banned them. Here are a few that I’ve come across in more recent years.
Clarus the Dogcow
This mythical animal from the Mac bestiary has been tucked away as an Easter egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer for many years. Type the letters clarus or moof (the sound it makes) into the search box of that viewer to see the two emoji figures of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance, as shown in the Page Setup window in recent macOS.
Marijuana leaves
More inaccessible, but apparently present for even longer, is a PNG image showing marijuana leaves embedded inside the Chess app. To see these, select Chess.app, and Show Package Contents. Work through the Contents, Resources and Styles folders and you’ll see two styles Fur and Grass, neither of which is offered in the app’s Settings. In the Grass folder, select Border.png to see a pattern of marijuana leaves.
I’ve been unable to find a way of accessing these as a style for the app, though. Chess also has a unique About window that not only contains the full GNU licence for the app, but offers a button to download the app’s source from Apple’s Open Source Releases page. Perhaps the intention is that you can build your own version of the app giving access to the Grass and Fur styles, making it the most convoluted Easter egg.
MAC wallpaper
According to a recent report in MacWorld, the colour-matched wallpapers provided for MacBook Neos spell out MAC.
Dont Steal Mac OS X
This is a kernel extension named Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext, found in /System/Library/Extensions, whose sole purpose is to contain Apple’s copyright statement, and in its own words “to protect Apple copyrighted materials from unauthorized copying and use.” Oddly, the current version claims copyright over the period 2006-2020 in its Info.plist, but 2006,2009 in its licence resource.
Minimise (defunct)
Until a few years ago, the yellow Minimise button in windows featured a set of Easter eggs that are claimed to have been a favourite of Steve Jobs. Clicking on that button with Control, Shift or Control and Shift keys held ran the animation at widely different speeds, and could be reversed when clicking on the minimised window in the Dock. These are described here, but have been removed since then.
RAM disk (defunct)
According to a relatively recent report in Tom’s Hardware, the ROM of Power Mac G3 models contains an Easter Egg of a hidden file when a RAM disk is created with the name secret ROM image.
I look forward to your sharing more.
The Eclectic Light Company 