Gnomeregan Decoded!

[Ruvanal]

Just kinda nifty to see the antecedents of this WoW easter egg; someone must be an old-school MacOS user.  To put this in perspective, the book I quoted is published in 1996.  Macs haven't used System 7 software for...almost a decade now?  (Been too long.)  This trick won't work in OSX or System 9 (which is today's Classic)--the System file is unreadable. 

Actually I have seen variations on this message before there were home computers much less apple computers and the later Macs. So this is a rather old style of a joke that well predates what you are referring to.