Subject: Origin: Peff
Date: Friday, May 10, 2002 8:30 PM
From: Kevin Looney
To: Kurt

Hello Kurt,

Your web pages are wonderful, and I’ve enjoyed listening to your Reason contributions. I am just starting out with Reason, but have been writing/recording all sorts of music for a while. I’ve worked at Digidesign on ProTools, and mostly use that now - but I think I’d like to work with both ProTools and Reason together.

For me, music is my obsession, and computers my profession. I worked at Apple for 5 years, and helped bring Apple through the transition from Motorola 680×0 processors to Power PC (in ‘92). My group invented PEF, so I thought I would try to explain the origins of PEF and JOY!PEFF.

PEF stands for Preferred Executable file Format (which tells a Macintosh computer how to load and run programs and the libraries they use). A Macintosh program contains all of its code bits in many different containers. These containers are called code-resources, and are similar to other resources on a Mac. “Joy!Peff” is an identifier at the beginning of these resources, used to verify that the computer did load one of these code thingys (as opposed to trying to execute a bitmap! :^).

PEFF was sort of an obvious name for the second tag. The Joy! part was an exclamation from the person defining this format while debugging it. There were other sorts of tags that were thrown in the code (for example, “DEADBEEF” was often written in the data after a codecontainer - so we could tell the system did something *really* bad if it tried to execute DEADBEEF.

I’m guessing you opened up a Macintosh application in ResEdit and saw JOY!PEFF at the beginning of a code resource.

(My favorite Apple tag/easter-egg: If you wrote “Where’s Elvis” on one of Apple’s original Newton PDAs, It would bring up a map of Tenessee and point to Graceland!)

Anyway, thats my contribution to silicon valley legends, hope you found that usefull/interesting/not-lame.

Best Regards,
Kevin Looney

Published with the permission of the author