NYC Resistor recently found an old Macintosh SE on a Brooklyn street and noticed an interesting easter egg buried in the ROMs after doing some digital digging.

According to NYC Resistor:

While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.

After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from “ Thu, Nov 20, 1986 “:

So…an Apple team apparently hid four of its own images in the Motorola 68000-era Macintosh nearly 26 years ago. Cool. NYC Resistor is now calling upon readers to identify the mystery employees. Go to the hacker blog to also learn more about the discovery’s engineering-side.

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