Hiding in plain sight
In writing my bio for Portland on Fire, I mentioned that I’d hidden my first name upside down in the “Read Me” file icon used on Macintosh during the late 1980’s: millions of people clicked on this icon to get help, and as far as I know, none of them noticed my name. The Wikipedia page for TeachText (the application I’d written which provides this icon) doesn’t mention this trivia (nor that I wrote it!).
After several years, TeachText was replaced by SimpleText, written by Tom Dowdy; Tom rightfully replaced my name with his; I’m just happy he kept the same style of icon. (I do rib Tom that TeachText was only 19K, where SimpleText was several times that in size.)
UPDATE: Sadly, I learned recently that Tom passed away. I’ll miss him: like many people I got to work with at Apple back then, he was smart and fun. I looked forward to seeing him every year at Apple’s developer conference, where we shared the distinction of being the only “Stump the Experts” experts who’d attended every session of that panel over the years.
[...] and his name was hidden in several system ROMs, as well as upside-down in plain sight in the read-me file icon used on Macintosh in the late [...]
Pingback by Bryan Stearns | Portland On Fire — Wednesday, February 27, 2008 @ 1:02 am
What a great story, aside from the unfortunate news about your friend. I’d love to see a SimpleText icon for comparison. I couldn’t find one on the web.
TextEdit appears not to have kept the tradition, instead including a whole letter from Johnny Appleseed:
http://nslog.com/2007/08/28/that_answers_that
What a difference in pixel resolution in 20 years, eh?
Comment by AdamD — Wednesday, February 27, 2008 @ 2:17 am
Comment by Bryan Stearns — Monday, March 3, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
Wow, I didn’t know you wrote TeachText Bryan. Hah! Nice one with the 3-pixel “r”. You should give a name to that font, like “MicroBryan 2″.
Comment by Reid — Thursday, March 6, 2008 @ 7:03 pm