Google Engineers Hide BSOD Easter Egg Inside CR-48
Posted 06/05/2011 at 10:27am | by Justin Kerr @ www.maximumpc.com


CR-48 BSOD

Google’s engineers are known for having a somewhat unique sense of humor, but this CR-48 Easter Egg is a pretty hilarious shot across Microsoft’s bow. An intrepid young developer by the name of Brad Wells discovered a series of clues spread across the web, which when analyzed carefully, allowed him to uncover a fake blue screen of death. Hidden within the error code he also discovered message from the Chrome OS development team.

According to his blog post, Brad began his search on LinkedIn after taking up the challenge left by Chrome OS developer Bill Richardson. In Richardson’s profile he noticed a project entry for “Integrated Lights Out Management” (ILOM). A simple Google search for “ILOM easter eggs” uncovered an odd-looking command titled “xyzzy”.

According to Wikipedia “Xyzzy is a magic word from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game. In computing, the word is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code, the canonical "magic word". In mathematics, the word is used as a mnemonic for the cross product”.

Brad went on to discover that if he typed “Xyzzy” into his CR-48 during boot, he was greeted with a hexadecimal message that could be converted to English using ASCII characters.

“Greetings from the Chrome OS x86 firmware team. This message is brought to you by Randall, Bill, Vadim, Gaurav, and Kelly. Also by the letter G and the number 42. If you’ve enjoyed this gadget, please join us at http://www.chromium.org to help make it even better. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress. No animals were harmed in the production of this message. Apply only to affected area. Cape does not enable wearer to fly. Contents may have settled during shipment. Use no hooks.”

I never would have found this in a million years, so kudos to Brad Wells on the discovery!

Can you post the link to the article so I can read it better? Jsp formats the page like balls.

just go to www.maximumpc.com it's like 2nd or 3rd article down on first page

just post the link or stop posting spam.

for the 1,237th time...the links to maxpc don't work lol

Because you don't post them correctly.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/google_engineers_hide_bsod_easter_egg_inside_cr-48

Works perfectly fine for me.

I'm not editing links...coz u too laxy to type: www.maximumpc.com lol

now try the quoted link lol

sometimes they work for articles on first page tho....but u can just bookmark the site too lol

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/google_engineers_hide_bsod_easter_egg_inside_cr-48

This post was edited by ghot on Jun 5 2011 08:32pm

I didn't edit the link at all. I just copy pasta'd it, then put url tags around it. Is that really that hard?

And I think you did something to the link, because when I quote it, the link breaks like this.



I figured out why it broke. I put the tag up there, and it broke it for me.

You still tampered with the link in your quote.

This post was edited by BreakPoint on Jun 5 2011 08:33pm

so did I..just above...and it prolly works....try it with an article 2-4 pages deep

no I didn't I just clicked the blue quote >>>>

This post was edited by ghot on Jun 5 2011 08:34pm

That's not why it doesn't work when you post them. It's because you don't put the url tags around it. So that takes out the underscores.

The page isn't found because there are no underscores in it, doesn't matter where it is located on the site.