[notherhack]

Long ago at a startup, In-System Design, I was on a team that made one of the first USB-to-ATA mass storage adapter chips. Small company, having fun, one of us put in an easter egg so that when the drive was plugged in and before the OS enumerated it the drive activity light would blink our team cheer, "ISD rocks!", in morse. He even added a test to make sure it worked in verilog simulation.

The chip was fairly successful and years later someone out in the world noticed the funny blinking on their retail USB drive that used it and they figured it out. They wrote a letter to the editor of Byte or Dr. Dobbs or something, wondering what the message "Sis you rock!" meant. Twisted sister fan, maybe?

We saw the letter in the magazine and were chuffed that our easter egg had hatched but... It turns out the designer had typoed the table of ASCII-to-morse values and dot/dash timing he used to build the messaging circuit, so it really was saying "Sis you rock!". And because he also wrote the test it didn't catch the error. Doh!