Retro: Enjoy the 1993 Easter Egg Video from the Macintosh Quadra 840av Team in Apple

Feb 17, 2024 - Leave a Comment

If you’re a fan of Apple history and retro Apple stuff, you’ll probably appreciate this little blast from the past.

Sometime in 1993, a small team of young developers at Apple built the Macintosh Quadra 840AV and Centris 660AV, and upon completion of their project, filmed a little celebration video, where they toast to their accomplishment, and show off the motherboard of the new Macintosh desktop. That QuickTime video was then tucked into the System 7.1 CD that came bundled with those two Macintosh computers, as a little Easter Egg to be found and appreciated by fans.

Fast forward 31 years to 2024, and you don’t need to go hunting on Ebay or digging around in some dusty closet to find ancient MacOS classic CD’s, because the video has been archived for posterity on YouTube, and you can watch it below.

A few things stand out to me from watching this video:

The Quadra 840AV / Centris 660AV team was tiny! Makes you wonder, how big are the teams that work on modern Macs we all enjoy?
The team is so young and proud of their achievement, they look like a group of college kids having a fun time together
A Pirate Flag is on the wall in the background! It’s familiar, but different from the famous Apple Jolly Roger flag (and which we included in a wallpaper post over a decade ago)
I genuinely miss the era of abundant Easter Eggs tucked into Apple software and products

As a (geeky) kid, I used to browse through Mac Warehouse and MacMall catalogs, and I’d build dream setups around the Quadra 840AV, but it was completely unobtainable to me. At that time, I was using the family Macintosh SE/30, and the 840AV was like a dream machine. It was the fastest Mac of the 68000 era at 40mhz, and could be expanded up to a (then seemingly ludicrous) 128MB RAM! I mean, check out this dream setup from that Macintosh epoch!