Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 5:09 AM
While working on a small audio project, I dicovered this Easter egg on a microphone preamp board out of an old Mac. Printed on the back of the board is “©1992 Apple Computer” — text you’d expect to find on any piece of Apple hardware of that date. However, you’ll notice that the letter L in Apple is the so-called “Jesus fish” symbol seen on vehicles nearly everywhere in the country. The sybolism has been around, on car bumpers at least, since the 1980s (credit to my girlfriend for finding out this fact). So, it’s entirely possible that someone slipped this into the circuit silkscreen before the boards went into production. I wonder what the real story is…
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It’s older than that – google “ichthus christian symbol”. Where was the board manufactured?
The symbol has actually been around since biblical times. It was a way of greeting. They would both draw a curved line in the sand.
Very interesting. If it is intended to be an ichthys (fish symbol), it is a little flat, but I can definitely see the possibility that this was, indeed, intended to be an ichthys.
For more information on the symbol and its background (including much older pagan origins), check out this article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
I had read the Wikipedia article on it — pretty interesting. I had meant to link to it in the post! Whoops.
or its a lowercase l in handwritting.
I don’t think that the reference to the 80′s was a dating of the symbol itself so much as it’s popular use as the “Jesus Fish” on car bumpers. It may be important to note that the Reagan era was the time when this symbol became extremely wide-spread and visible, and then appeared on an Apple product of the early 90′s — point being that it’s probably not a mistake or fluke.
I’ve seen similar Apple circuit boards that have the same marking. I don’t think it’s religious in nature, though I may be wrong. I think it might just have to do with whatever symbol library was available for characters during the circuit silkscreening process. If you notice, all of the letters look funny, and none sit on an actual ‘baseline’ like most typography. Letters that drop below the baseline are always annoying, and sometimes are condensed, abbreviated or changed to fit.
Why would the silkscreening process have been designed from scratch, though, with such…ugly…type?