The members of NYC Resistor hacker group discovered, stored inside the ROM of an old Macinstosh SE, a series of images and a strange encrypted string, placed there in 1986 by members of the development team that computer. This particular "computer easter egg" was discovered while investigating hackers source code contained in the ROM of a Mac SE that found abandoned on the streets of Brooklyn.

We all know what a "computer easter egg". Those messages, images or extras that programmers often leave hidden in their creations to be discovered by users originated in 1979, when Warren Robinett, the developer of the game Adventure, Atari, included a secret trick that made his name appear on the screen. Currently, most applications have some phrase or message within your code, it is discovered rather quickly. But it seems that some of them have been hidden well enough to remain safe for over 25 years.

This is the case of images with a strange string NYC Resistor hacker found inside the ROM (read only memory) of an Apple Macinstosh SE. It all started when one of its members found in the streets of Brooklyn one of these computers left on a sidewalk. It is a machine that was released in the mid-1980s, and despite being a very advanced at that time, and is completely obsolete, so the owner decided to get him home safely together away. This hacker thought it was not right for such an interesting destination computer, so bore him to the headquarters of NYC Resistor.

When connected to the mains discovered that the machine booted, but it was not possible to use the computer for lacking the necessary peripherals. At this point they decided to devote himself to do a little "digital archeology". So it was off the case and removed the two ROM chips (PROM M27C512) machine, ready to read its contents. They put the chips in a reader ROMs, connected it to the PC and read its contents. They knew they had succeeded when viewed within 256KB read strings like "Chicago", "PACK" and "CDEF" (if they had misread the probability of finding a correctly spelled word is very low). They began to discuss the contents of this file, using free software tools like objdump, and then to identify the routines documented in manuals and websites dedicated to this computer, found some bits and blocks calls apparently were not documented.



They wrote a program in Python to convert those strings of bytes expressed in hexadecimal in PNG images and found four black and white photographs of 576 x 384 pixels, created with typical dot patterns that were used at the time (a system known as "diffusion-dithered 1-bit"), in which several persons whose names appear so far not been made public but presumed to be part of the team developing the computer. We also found a text string with no apparent sense ("JCSLWRLBBMABOEMTDAHJTCFJLMBKCRCLAKEHBRDCDAFSHFT") but that could be related to the images. It really is a surprising finding, which makes us think that surely there must be many "easter eggs" hidden in all that similar hardware that we thoughtlessly thrown away in recent decades.