Mac OS X Easter Egg

I've found an Easter Egg in Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". Mac OS X ships with a command line utility called appleping which lets you to ping machines on an AppleTalk network. AppleTalk is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, but Apple has kept this utility in Mac OS X.

If you open a Terminal window and run the appleping command, you'll see the following usage message:

Usage:  appleping net.node [data size] [npackets]

or:  appleping name:type@zone [data size] [npackets]

examples:  appleping 'John Sculley:Macintosh SE@Pepsi' 

or:  appleping 6b16.54

As you can plainly see, the example given is the user John Scully, CEO of Apple 1985-1993, on a Macintosh SE, in the zone Pepsi.

The joke is obvious. Scully was the CEO of Pepsi before he was hired by Apple in 1983. Legend has it that Jobs convinced him to come over to Apple by asking "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?".

I've just confirmed that the appleping utility has at least been present since the release of the incomplete Mac OS X Server 1.0, circa 1999, but may date to earlier Apple UNIX efforts, say mkLinux or A/UX.

UPDATE: This has been removed in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". The output is now:

Usage:  appleping net.node [data size] [npackets]
or:  appleping name:type@zone [data size] [npackets]

examples:  appleping 'John Doe:Macintosh SE@EndZone' 
or:  appleping 6b16.5