If you need 32K of ROM because your code is 26K, then that means you have 6K just available that no one will ever be able to access otherwise. Why not use it for an easter egg?
The physical ROM chip is a certain size. If you have 50kB left over, it doesn't matter if those bits are zeros or an easter egg.
and using 50K on someone's harddrive is a mortal sin? it's 50K. nobody will ever notice
This was back when people still used 1.44M floppies to boot in an emergency.
Not on a G3. These systems shipped with Mac OS 8; the System suitcase was over 6 MB alone. Apple stopped shipping systems with internal floppy drives altogether a few years later, with the iMac and blue-and-white G3.
You could absolutely boot a stripped-down Mac OS 8 on a floppy, including the beige G3. Apple even provided them ("Disk Tools").
Fascinatingly, the System file on the Disk Tools 8.1 floppy is actually a build of System 7, with HFS+ support grafted on.
didn't OS 8 come on a CD? I installed it from disc in my DVD drive. not sure how old you think the G3 is, but it's not as old as installing from floppy. just barely