Mister Macintosh (2004)

> There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers".

I also enjoyed the reference to Cicero's Pizza:

> Burell and I [Andy] liked to have lunch at Cicero's Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant that was just across the street. They had a Defender video game, which we'd play while waiting for our order. We'd also go to Cicero's around 4pm almost every day for another round of Defender playing; Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (see Make a Mess, Clean it Up!).

Now I get to admit my age. When I worked at Tymshare in the 1970s, we often went there when it was still named Coppola's Pizza.

It had previously been part of the Pee Wee's Pizza chain founded by Albert "Pee Wee" Proietti and Nunzio "Spike" Spacone. The Cupertino location was sold to Carmen and Palma Coppola, who named it Coppola's. They in turn sold it to their mother and father-in-law, Angelina and Nunzio Cicero. (Yes, another Nunzio.)

Nunzio Cicero kept the Coppola's name out of respect to Angelina's family name, and only after she passed in 1973 he named it after himself.

Cicero's Pizza moved a couple of times after that and is still in business on Bollinger Road in Cupertino.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634...

One fun thing about Coppola's/Cicero's is that they brought out the sliced pizza on a big round tray, but did not give out individual plates. Instead, you put a few napkins on the table and that was your plate!

As you can imagine, the tables got a fine layer of pizza grease over time.

Another Cupertino landmark around the corner from Coppola's/Cicero's was the R. Cali Brothers Mill on Stevens Creek. This was a huge animal feed mill and drive-through store. The front entrance sign said: “R. Cali & Bro. — Cupertino Feed Store, Ranch Spray Service, General Truck Hauling, Wood • Coal, Hay • Grain.”

You could drive your truck through to load it up with farm supplies, or take your car through as I did to get dog food.

This used MrMacHook, IIRC.

Our PCI compliance page is an easter egg:

https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html

1) more “professionalism” being expected in software. Computers aren’t quirky things anymore they’re “serious business” and “serious businesses don’t do quirky”. Or some other such nonsense.

2) Offense risk, something innocuous has serious potential to be taken wrong now or even at some future date. I worked on a system where we needed to impose some effectively arbitrary max limit on the number of items allowed to be configured. We eventually settled on “640k” and originally had an error if you exceed that that said “640k ought to be enough for anyone”. The devs who would have seen that message would have gotten the reference and hopefully had a good chuckle. But I’ve seen customers get short about innocuous jokes before and could easily have seen someone complaining that we weren’t taking their needs seriously.

3) Security liability. A lot of Easter eggs were distinct code paths or sometimes even entire tiny embedded applications. In an ever connected world where your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database, any unnecessary code path is also a potential security hole and risk. No one really wants to be in the news because a cute joke their developers put in 4 years ago was the key to a massive exploit.

Still I do agree that I miss some the “personality” older software could have.

https://www.theregister.com/ have it for instance.

The problem with Easter Eggs in the web era is that as soon as one person finds it, everyone knows about it. Part of the fun in the boxed software era was that you either had to find it yourself or hear about it from a friend.

That being said, we did have an easter egg on reddit for a long time that very few people noticed. Robots.txt included this:

    User-Agent: bender
    Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass 
    
    User-Agent: Gort
    Disallow: /earth

https://infinitemac.org/