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By: David K. Every
& Daniel Fanton
(C) Copyright 1999 DKE - All Rights Reserved.
Inside Mac (Programmers Documentation)
Eggs can be burried in documents as well as code. In the Original Inside Mac Volume VI. (The later Inside Macs were organized by topic -- the earlier ones by time/release). Volume VI is the reference guide from Apple released for System 7.0. Anyways, page 2-26 has the following:
A dialog box with the title "Cat Detector", and the text:Detect a purr at:
- 10 yards
- 20 yards
- 30 yards
If you don't recognize this, it's from an obscure Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch.
Foo-Bar
The Foo-Bar isn't a chinese bar and grill. This is the most common egg, and is used a lot in sample code -- it is Foo and Bar as variables or procedure names. This comes from a sarcastic Military Acronym "FUBAR" -- which means, "Fucked-Up Beyond All Recognition". This one has spread from Mac documentation into just about everywhere else as well. I see it in programming books, and in lectures, and so on. It is a programmers egg, just meant to give programmers a chuckle, especially if others don't know what it means. Oh well, now I've gone and spoiled all the fun.
Many More
These type of special meaning eggs seem to be everywhere. I should dig up my old Inside Macs, and document the little secret messages burried throughout (if anyone knows any, just let me know).
But you can see them everywhere if you look. Heck, I remember being the only person in a theater who was laughing while watching the Movie "The Terminator". Here this very sophisticate butch Super-Robot of the future is running around and killing everything. Occasionally they would show things from the "Terminators" perspecitive. These shots would would have code listings super-imposed on the screen (and scrolling by) to help Arnold-Shwatzenegger (The Terminator) make decisions (which always seemed to be "kill NOW!"). Well what processor and code was being used for the ultimate cyborg? Why the Super-Futuristic 6502 Processor Machine/Assembly Code (which was well antiquated by that time) -- and it was specifically romping through the Apple][ ROM listings, doing its DOS functions. Somehow "Boot Disk" translates to kill everyone -- and people think I'm a psycho for laughing at the mayhem.
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