A Maxtor hardware engineer must’ve been a classic car guy.
When computer Hobbyist Davin LaBar took apart a vintage Maxtor 7171AT hard drive to inspect the circuit board, he was surprised to find an Easter Egg in the form of a classic Pontiac GTO.
LaBar’s post can be found here.
Easter Eggs, or hidden messages, art, or features often not meant to be discovered immediately, have been a part of computer engineering since at least the 1960s.
Printed on microchips and circuit boards, Easter Eggs once served as a form of copyright protection but, sometime in the mid-’80s, these particular hardware Easter Eggs were left solely as a signature, an homage to the circuit board designer, and became purely decorative.
This Easter Egg was found on a Maxtor 7000 series hard drive, a 7171AT, with a whopping 172 MBs of storage. Designed and sold in the mid-’90s, that much storage was more than enough for the average computer user.
I found the same model hard drive on eBay and, like LeBar’s, there’s a Pontiac GTO on the logic board with Roman Number IV on the plates, too.
It’s worth noting LeBar was not the first person on the internet to find this Easter Egg as Theodore Munk of Munk.org found it and blogged about it sometime in the mid-2000s (his webpage uses Microsoft Frontpage 1.1.)
I found another Maxtor 7171AT with a different PCB configuration and this one had a pair of horses that look an awful lot like the ones on the Ford Mustang logo.
Or, maybe his daughter liked horses? Your guess is as good as mine.
And, on this PCB of a Maxtor 7540AV hard drive also found on eBay with a gigantic 540 MB of storage space, there are a pair of these checkered flags with the Roman numeral III.
I browsed through a few more ’90s era Maxtor hard drive PCBs and found a lot of nature-themed ones.
And, here’s an airplane, one with forward-mounted canards. A Piaggio P180?
Know of any cool, car-related circuit board easter eggs?
Let me know in the comments below.
