Jun 6, 2011 12:39 GMT  ·  By

Late last year, when Google was supposed to be unveiling its early awaited Chrome OS, the company instead announced that there will be a six months delay while the team works out the final kinks. But it also announced the Cr-48 program, a very interesting way of getting real-world feedback by sending out tens of thousands of Chrome OS-powered notebooks.

The Cr-48 laptops were not exactly the greatest piece of hardware ever created, software and some hardware bugs abounded, to be expected from an experimental product.

But the rough edges came with a sugar coating, since this machine was intended for those that already spend most of their times in the browser and were fairly tech-savvy.

This is why Cr-48 machines came with several features that delighted developers and hackers alike, along with some hidden Easter eggs for the more curious users.

For example, Cr-48 can be jailbroken, enabling users to install other operating systems on them and access the main system files, with the simple flick of a switch, quite literally.

Shortly after the Cr-48s were announced, Google started promoting the device and Chrome OS through a series of videos showcasing in just how many ways such a device can be damaged or completely obliterated, with the data remaining safe in the cloud.

In one of those videos lurked a hidden message, on a blackboard an equation was written, just waiting to be solved. Several inquisitive developers got on the case and won themselves one of the first Cr-48 devices.

But a few days ago, one of Google's engineers that worked on Chrome OS revealed that there is still an Easter egg on the Cr-48 devices, wondering why it hadn't been found yet.

That was enough to spark the interest of quite a few people and, just a day later, the mystery was solved.

"I found the easter egg developer Bill Richardson teased. There’s a blue screen of death hidden within the bios," Bradley Wells, the one that found the Easter egg wrote.

Wells explains how he found the message in a blue screen that can be accessed during boot. Among some technical details, the blue screen contains a lot of hex code.

Once converted into ASCII, here's what the code reads: "Greetings from the Chrome OS x86 firmware team. This message is brought to you by Randall, Bill, Vadim, Gaurav, and Kelly. Also by the letter G and the number 42. If you’ve enjoyed this gadget, please join us at http://www.chromium.org to help make it even better."

"We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress. No animals were harmed in the production of this message. Apply only to affected area. Cape does not enable wearer to fly. Contents may have settled during shipment. Use no hooks," the message continued.