Sosumi

In 1991, Jim Reekes was a sound designer at Apple Computer in Cupertino, California, working on the system sounds for System 7 of the Macintosh operating system. He had composed a short melodic chime that he intended to use as a generic alert tone. When he played it for his manager, he was told to rename it immediately: Apple was then in the middle of a legal dispute with Apple Corps, The Beatles' record label, over the use of the Apple name in anything that could be construed as musical.

Reekes renamed the sound 'Sosumi,' a phonetic spelling of the phrase 'so sue me.' The joke ran in two directions. It acknowledged that Apple Computer was walking a legal line by publishing a musical sound file while being sued for exactly that kind of overlap. It also expressed the defiance of a programmer who thought the situation had become absurd. Apple Corps had first sued Apple Computer in 1978 and would continue to do so until 2006; Sosumi was the sound department's editorial response.

System 7 shipped in May 1991 with Sosumi as one of its named alert sounds, alongside Indigo, Quack, Boing, and others. The name appeared in the system's Sound control panel, which meant every Macintosh user who opened that panel and read the list saw the joke without being told it was one. The word sat there, labeled, for anyone curious enough to say it aloud.

Sosumi entered tech vocabulary as a specific proper noun and, over time, as a shorthand for any private joke embedded in software as a comment, a variable name, or a file label. The practice had existed before: programmers had hidden messages in code since the 1970s. But Sosumi had a legal dimension that earlier Easter eggs lacked, and that made it legible to non-programmers as something more than whimsy.