Ran across this last night. Check out this tongue-in-cheek apple timeline — past and future.

Gotta love those Mac goggles!

For the first few years, the insides of Macintosh computers contained a pretty cool hidden secret: the signatures of their design teams molded into the plastic cases. (You can read more on Folklore.org and see more images on myoldmac.net) When we cracked open a IIci earlier this month to see why it was failing to boot, I just couldn’t resist taking out the motherboard to see if the signatures promised in the Wikipedia article were actually there. Yep, sure enough. The names are: Gavin Ivester, Pat Jackson, Jimmy Melton, Grant Ross, Terry Smith, Tom Toedtman and Laszlo Zsidek. (I deciphered the squiggly ones thanks to Apple confidential 2.0 by Owen W. Linzmayer.)

Now that Mike has put a replacement power supply in the balky IIci (bad power supply being the reason it wouldn’t boot, apparently) we’ll have to see if there’s an image of the development team in ROM. Wikipedia’s 1 for 1 so far so I’m inclined to believe that …

[a]n easter egg exists in the IIci ROM. If the system date is set to September 20, 1989 (the machine’s release date) and the Command – Option – C – I buttons held during boot time, an image of the development team will be displayed.

If Mike doesn’t get on that, I’m going to have to post a silly picture. Oops, too late.

Update, March 18 2012: Mike’s got the photos posted.

— Martin