njc@nsscb.UUCP (Neil Cherry) (01/17/90)
Under the os9 O.S. if you dump som of the binaries you'll see DEAD FACE as part of the hex dump. But I don't remember if its on the 6809 or the 68K version. Aslo to add heat to the Terminator Apple vs. IBM fire. I veiwed the tape and found the code hard to read. But I did find a scene where the code shows the following instructions STA , LDA, PLA. the numbers that followed are not readable. Also the other segments of code appear to be db statements used by both IBM and 6502 coders. And as a last point iocb's seem to be generic for almost all O.S.'s.
merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) (01/17/90)
In article <1990Jan16.011712.16993@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>, tim@cunixf (Timothy Jones) writes: | | The magic number for the 1.0 Mach kernel on the Next computer is | 0xFEEDFACE. And, there's some magic number, somewhere in the Sequent kernel (although the location now escapes me -- I'm the "Alzheimer's Disease Poster Child" this week), that is: 0xDEADBABE (yep... Dead Baby!) Just another former Sequent employee (#64, can ya believe it)... -- /== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\ | on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III | | merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn | \== Cute Quote: "Welcome to Oregon... Home of the California Raisins!" ==/
limes@sun.com (Greg Limes) (01/17/90)
Strange that Sequent uses "FEED FACE DEAD BEEF" ... I used to work with one of their current fine employees (Hi JJB!) back at Culler Scientific (that's another story), and we needed all sorts of these readable patterns during the bringup of the machines. It was no problem to grep through /usr/dict/words to get the list. To this day, the constant 0xDEADBEEF gets sprinkled around my code as initialization values for variables that have no sane initial value. My favorite 64-bit constant -- 0xDEADBEEFFEEDC0ED -- was always hanging around in my diagnostics programs, which left me watching out for things like "-6.259853e+18" and "-1.188596e+148" in the floating point registers. Not sure where we at Culler got these constants, but I suspect that they were probably independently "discovered" at lots of different places over the years. beta1% grep '^[abcdefois]*$' /usr/dict/words -- Greg Limes limes@sun.com ...!sun!limes 73327,2473 CGDB02A [choose one]
bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) (01/17/90)
Perhaps someone mentioned this but various magic numbers in BSD Unix
(and perhaps other flavors) are encodings of people's birthdays.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade | bzs@world.std.com
1330 Beacon St, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202 | {xylogics,uunet}world!bzskeith@celia.UUCP (Keith Goldfarb) (01/17/90)
Embedded in LOGO for the Apple II were the words "Resist The Draft" I could never get them to be displayed by the program -- only a search of memory revealed them. K. -- Keith Goldfarb Rhythm & Hues celia!keith@tis.llnl.gov celia!keith@usc.edu ...mlogic!celia!keith I got nothing. Too bad. But I'm happy 'cause that's all I have.
davidle@microsoft.UUCP (David LEVINE) (01/18/90)
In article <191@jabberwock.shs.ohio-state.edu> Michel Jackson <jackson@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes: >I have heard that the "magic number" in the first two >bytes of MS-DOS *.EXE files is ASCII "MZ" - for Mark Zibokowski (sp? - >forgive me MZ if you're out there) - the designer of the EXE format >that came in with MSDOS 2 (?). > ---michel jackson Mark Zbikowski says "its true". David Levine
byrd@husc7.HARVARD.EDU (John "The Squid" Byrd) (01/18/90)
Digital Solution's "Pocket Writer 2" for the Commodore 64 had several interesting messages in a PETSCII dump of the loader program: things like "COMMODORE RULES ... ATARI SUCKS! ... QUIT NOW, WHILE YOU ARE STILL AHEAD!" (apparently a message to nasty juvenile hacks like me) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Byrd ! byrd@husc7.harvard.edu ! "Uh, could you repeat the question?" Q-Link: John Byrd ! - Sid Vicious CompuServe: 74506,3612 ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Byrd ! byrd@husc7.harvard.edu ! "Uh, could you repeat the question?" Q-Link: John Byrd ! - Sid Vicious CompuServe: 74506,3612 ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
profesor@wpi.wpi.edu (Matthew E Cross) (01/18/90)
These reminded me of a couple more c64 hidden messages... The first isn't really a message, it's a song, imbedded in a (guess...) word processor! It was one put out by commodore (Easy Script I beleive) If you hit F1 then CTRL-3, it played pomp and circumstance (just like the commercial for those of you who remember it) Another is on an old game called Blue Max. It was a WW2 plane flying game (correct me if im wrong). I searched thru the disk with a sector editor, and came across a whole track filled with a "letter" (?) the author wrote to anoyone examing the disk. He started out with why are you looking at my code, i worked hard, etc. etc. If anybody's interested, i could try to dig it up, and post it. But until then, keep lookin for them secret messages! -profesor P.S. the Color Computer 3 ctrl-alt-reset works good!