Where’s Waldo… in a CPU?
I bet you never thought to look in the microscopic etchings of circuits on computer chips to find where Waldo’s been hiding. See here. Apparently microchip designers have been etching in art and words into their circuits for decades. These things are ridiculously small, only seen with a microscope, and smaller than the width of a human hair.
The link above has samples of this stuff including Waldo, Marvin the Martian, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, and my favorite, a message in Russian to would-be reverse-engineers in Russia during the Cold War taunting them “If you’re gonna steal, steal the best.”
Of course, its not all fun and games. The aluminum flakes that made up the spots on the image of a cheetah on one of HP’s chips ended up coming off and caused the chip to fail. Who bets someone got fired for that?