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Apple Easter Eggs
Hardware: All PowerMacs


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

 Sounds

Macs all have a startup sound, and a "death chime". Since Apple used a ROM for many different machines (or changed as little as they had to), these sounds only changed every few years or so.

Startup

Death Chimes

The "Death Chimes" are heard if there is a hardware failure early in the boot process. This was usually a RAM failure, but could be for SCSI failure or other things as well. (Often there was a different set of beeps before or after the "Death Chime" to let technicians know what failed.

You could usually force the death chimes by holding the Interrupt Button (or Command-Power) key during boot.

Special thanks to David P. Schaub (A.K.A. Marvin) for digitizing all the sounds --
I just converted them to QuickTime format, and viola!

Eggs

Of course since Sound was such an important part of the Mac, there were certainly a few sound eggs.

A program called ROMmie can help people find them. I will try to add an archive of those sounds here.

I remember the PowerBook 520 as having this really cool jet sound -- it's code name was "The BlackBird", named after the SR-71 airplane. I heard one once (in stereo) as the startup sound -- but they probably pulled it out right before release.

The Quadra 900 was supposed to have a different crash sound. It was a large diesel engine starting up. It never shipped for some unknown reason -- too bad, I think these things give models some personality.

I'd love to get these sounds, or find out if they are still hidden in there.

Created: 09/17/98
Updated: 11/09/02

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