Brooklyn-based hackers from NYC Resistor, Adam Mayer together with Trammell Hudson, found a series of photos of the Apple team who worked and designed on the classic Apple Macintosh SE computer 25 years ago. The images were secretly hidden in the ROM chip with a revealing message from “Thu, Nov 20, 1986“
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“. – Nycresistor
But what is ROM? ROM is an abbreviation for “Read Only Memory” or properly known as “non-volatile memory”. It stores its contents regardless if the computer is switched off. Through the method of ROM dumping, they were able to expose these incredible old images as they hack their way in. To know more about the details of how they did it, check out Nycresistor.com.
Ghosts in the ROM (Via Boingboing)
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