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Apple Easter Eggs
The Valley


By: David K. Every
& Daniel Fanton
(C) Copyright 1999 DKE - All Rights Reserved.

Silicon Valley

This is the most famous, and probably the oldest easter egg released by Apple. It started with System .1 (notice the decimal place -- not System 1, but .1) in like 1983.

When holding down the Option key while in the Finder, go up to what would normally be "About This Macintosh..." in the Apple Menu. Instead, it will say "About The Finder...". When you select it, you will see a picture of Silicon Valley (in abstract). After a while it will give a list of credits at the bottom.

If the Finder is past version 7.0 and the creation date of the invisible "Desktop Folder" is May 13, 1991 or later, it will have credits for all of those who created the Finder from the Lisa on.

If Balloon Help is turned on, the drop-menu says "Displays a dialog with the original Finder picture."

By holding down Command and Option you will see a wacky cursor.

Finder 1.1g

In Finder 1.1g (the first publicly released version of the Finder from 1984) the "About this Macintosh" dialog had the now infamous moutainous backdrop -- and if you held down a key combination while selecting "About this Mac...", the cursor would turn into a little skier and you could ski him (or her) up and down the mountains!

Silicon Valley meets Clarus!

Adam Lang ([email protected]) gave me the history about an improvement to the Silicon Valley Picture (built directly into the ROM), right around the the time that System 7 was going to be released. The way it was going to work was that when you went to the "About the Finder..." window (and held down keys like D and C) it would show the regular black and white landscape -- and then you would pan away to discover what the valey really is: part of Clarus the dogcow! Then the credits would roll and all would be explained.

Sadly, there wasn't enough time and space to get it put into the ROMs. On the brighter side of things, there is an extention which patches your System that has the DogCow movie and will run the egg called "Clarus-The Tail Patch", which was made in 1991 by David Ewing and Tim Senecal. But that extension doesn't seem to like modern machines (and OS versions) very much. So through the miracle of modern persistance, the use of QuickTime, and some creative editing, I have made a QuickTime Movie (from the original images) to show you what it was going to look like: ClarusTheDogCowMovie.

Silicon Valley meets Copland!

Provided by Jack Frost ([email protected])

Silicon Valley picture was going to be replaced in Copland with the dazzling picture below. But alas, Copland died, as did it's spiffy color about box.

It looks excellent in thousands or millions of colors. I was only able to put in here at 256 because of the space it took up. The picture was never put in and was traded for the graphic you see now in MacOS8.

Mac OS 8 Valley!

Apple believed MacOS8 was the greatest thing to happen to the Mac since 1984. Thinking out with the old, in with new, MacOS8 engineers made a brand new Silicon Valley to replace th old black and white one -- this one was color and rendered. You will notice that at the end of the credits, after the Special Thanks, the employess who lost their jobs after the restructuring are listed.

Like the original, to see it just hold the option key and select the "About the Finder.." menu item, from the Apple Menu.

 


Created: 08/26/98
Updated: 11/09/02


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