Jun 25, 2025 19:00:00

Easter egg discovered in 27-year-old Power Mac G3 ROM

Doug Brown, a Linux kernel contributor and engineer, has reported that he has discovered a previously undiscovered Easter egg in a PowerMac G3 manufactured between 1997 and 1999.

Downtown Doug Brown » Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/06/finding-a-27-year-old-easter-egg-in-the-power-mac-g3-rom/

Brown was using a tool called ' ex Fiend ' to examine the resources stored in the ROM of a Power Mac G3, which was used in desktop, mini-tower and all-in-one Power Mac G3s manufactured between 1997 and 1999.

Brown then discovered the following image in the ROM: A group photo of what appears to be the development team. The image itself was

discovered in 2014, but it was unclear how it was displayed.

Upon further investigation, Brown became interested in the mysterious Pascal strings 'secret ROM image' and 'The Team' at the end of the PowerPC native (PDF file) SCSI Manager 4.3 code.

To understand how these strings are used, Brown disassembled the code and ran it with Ghidra . He discovered that a specific function locates a RAM disk driver called 'EDisk,' checks whether the RAM disk volume name is 'secret ROM image,' and if it matches, reads the HPOE resource, i.e. the team photo, and writes it to that volume as a JPEG file named 'The Team.'

After analyzing the data, it was found that the name of the RAM disk should be 'secret ROM image', but the specific method for triggering the attack was unknown. Brown shared his findings in an online chat, where a user named 'alex' reported that he tried it on an emulator and entered the name 'secret ROM image' when formatting the RAM disk, which triggered the easter egg.

So Brown tried it on his own machine and found that a file called 'The Team' was written to a volume called 'secret ROM image.'

When I double-clicked on 'The Team,' the image opened as shown below.

When Steve Jobs, who had been expelled from Apple, returned to the company in 1997, he is said to have banned such 'fun elements,' and Brown speculates that this Easter egg may be the last one. 'I wonder if Jobs knew about this Easter egg,' he wonders. He also said that if anyone who was an Apple employee at the time knows the details of this Easter egg, please contact him.