Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0
techradar.com
techradar.com
> The sequence for triggering the feature depends on the version:
> 1.xx: Press Alt+Shift+Esc+Enter
> 1.01 and later: Hold Alt and then Esc, release Alt and then Esc, press Esc twice and then press Backspace.
1.xx was a slightly prerelease version shipped with the Tulip System PC Compact. I don’t know if anyone has looked in DR5, or the alpha or beta versions that have been preserved.
There’s a similar egg in 2.x. Also from BetaWiki:
> To trigger this easter egg, you must press F1, F5, F9, F4, and Backspace in quick succession.
Then I was demoing the software to leadership in a surprise visit, and it triggered. Turns out, I'd ORed the keys together! I tried to Ctrl-A+DEL but... the email was longer than the comment field and triggered a state in which any keypress was rejected with an alert, even one that would shorten the comment (bug #2). And I couldn't leave the form, as the early prototype was designed to save-on-exit. So I had to kill the app... lesson learned.
My last easter egg was simply the name of "Lightish Red" for one of the AI colors in Halo Infinite. Much safer (once it got through localization, hah).
i can imagine that passed with flying colors
I want you to know that the reddit halo community loves you.
I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be considered more worthy of one's time than the other.
He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies would drain him further.
I hope all of this information about legacy systems is documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and worked with these systems get older and pass away.
> Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13]
[13] Whittle, Peter (1979), "Discussion of Dr Gittins' paper", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 41 (2): 148–177, doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1979.tb01069.x
Given the size of the code, once you’ve found the dialog, I guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn’t too hard (a fuzzer that you can ask “give me a series of inputs that gets this procedure called” might even answer that question for you)
Worth it.
The story goes that Newell was doing analytics for Microsoft by running software that scanned and reported what people had installed on their PCs -- this was back in the Windows 3.x days when Microsoft sought consent from the user before doing this kind of thing. Microsoft wanted to know how many PCs had Windows running on them. Gabe's market research found that a great many PCs did have Windows -- Windows was the second most installed software on the PCs surveyed.
Number one was Doom.
After that, Gaben started thinking maybe gaming was a better play.
Since nobody had an Internet connection in those days, it was literally impossible to get the data back to Microsoft without the user's involvement.
If 1993 Microsoft could have collected this data automatically, they certainly would have.
So how would they have retrieved this data?
He mentions that Microsoft had a program where they partnered with large enterprises to collect usage data from corporate desktops. But those computers were on a network even if though often not on the Internet yet.
Stats that would show Doom towering over Windows 3.1 must have been collected manually, maybe by sending people a floppy that contained a program to collect the data, and asking them to mail it back in. "Insert floppy, then type A:\SPY.EXE in your DOS prompt" ...
What makes you think that "nobody" had an internet connection in "those days?" We weren't riding around on the backs of dinosaurs and cooking up bronto-burgers on the weekends.
Winsock came out in June of 1992, right in the middle of the Windows 3.x life cycle.
I do remember using Winsock on Windows 3.1 to grab Usenet updates on expensive dial-up. The batch Internet :)
I kinda wish they'd dabble back into this area. The Portal games are some of the most interesting, atmospheric, and well-humoured games I've ever played. And it seems that after Portal 2 they got so hooked into VR that all they've really made is a bunch of VR demos.
But whatever, the Steam Deck seems like it has the potential to really revolutionize a new space in PC gaming, so maybe it's better they stay focused on one thing at a time than half-assedly do a bunch of things like Microsoft or Google.
Are you sure? After the multimedia PC, and later videoCD's and DivX it wasn't an heresy any more.
In the 1998 the cost of the DVD setup was quite pricey: about $500-800 (ie ~$1000 in current money). In the next years the price dropped quite significantly ($200 in 2001, $100 in 2002), but your run of the mill PC wasn't suited as a home theatre system (no HDMI yet, duh! Only S-Video on some systems) and most people didn't even had the PC in the house, for many the niche of a home entertainment system was filled by PlayStation 2 which costed only $300 (+$100-150 compared to a DVD player) in 2001 and it was hooked to the TV.
So the idea of actually watching the films on the PC wasn't quite popular... except for the quoted DivX ;-) 3.11 codec. Which came to existence in the 1999 and was used only for... un-official releases. By the 2001 there was tons and tons of films available in DivX, but by that time it was definitely not '90s.
So I would agree with GP - nobody watched videos on PCs in '90.
No, VideoCD and RealMedia doesn't count. It was more a self-inflicted BDSM session than enjoying the video.
Yeah, well, early 00's were kinda like 90's. And, yes the PS2 was the cheapest DVD player ever. Still, I'd consider DivX the bridge between mid 90's multimedia PC concept and the modern MP4 and later MKV players.
The appeal from that side wasn't "here's PC video on your 27" big-screen TV", it was "here's a 4-inch video window on your 17" monitor, so you can consume video content while doing other stuff."
Wikipedia says it originally came with Windows 3.0 back in 1990.
Some other things in that book that I learned: Microsoft passed on the opportunity to use Postscript. Windows running in protected mode started as someone's summer skunkworks project at a time when the company assumed that OS/2 was the actual future.
I guess they're less of a thing now because it's been done so much, and with Internet everyone is immediately aware of it, they're not as fun as in the past.
Android for example had multiple easter eggs, when you go the phone information and tap multiple times on the version number you get an animation.
I can, yes. Easter eggs aren't some clever thing that a developer sneakily included. They're just features that aren't documented. They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like everything else.
And the product owner agrees spending half of the sprint points on Easter eggs. :)
I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something... https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote...
AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kfpjhg/i_am_dave_plum...
Easter eggs are still a thing, in software and even in production cars.
I'm not sure Microsoft did formal code review at the time, by the way. Windows was the first time its rather informal development practices became a liability.
> Of course Microsoft did a really good job at hiding it and I still don't really know how to trigger it. I patched some binaries to force it to show up.
https://aviationhumor.net/soviet-b-29-clone-the-tupolev-tu-4...
"'What kind of stars should be put on the mass-produced aircraft – white American stars or red Soviet ones? If you put white stars, you risked being shot as an enemy of the people. If you put red, first, it will not be a copy, and second maybe Stalin is planning to use the bombers against America, England or China, and therefore keep the American markings.’ The question went all the way up to Stalin himself: Beria (NKVD chief, in charge of B-29 duplication project) ‘told Stalin about the stars as if it were a funny story and that by the way in which Stalin laughed at the joke, Beria knew unerringly which stars should be used. The last problem was solved and mass-production started…’”
As far as I know, the only kind of software that routinely does that is games ; and I suspect it is because games have an "ending", and the analogy works with plays and movies that have credits in the end.
The software departments of any Marvel / Pixar flicks is probably bigger than most of the teams I worked with, and noone seems to be terrified to see their names printed after the generic bad guy with the blue skybeam is defeated...
Open source projects have an AUTHORs.txt file ; would it really break the stability of the financial world if they had a `--credits` flag, too ?
I haven't used PS recently to know it is still does
I don't know if that's everyone at Adobe on Photoshop or not, but there's 50-ish or more names on the splash screen at launch. - https://natashashaneek.com/adobe-photoshop-splash-screen-202...
This actually took some time to become the norm, with some really notorious incidents of companies that refused to let developers be credited in game. The Castlevania games, for eg, had fake horror movie-ish names in their credits. The developer credit in Adventure was an easter egg as well. Even Nintendo games had credits that were often full of pseudonyms.
I have to doubt the argument here. I was there 20 years ago, and the companies that wanted to recruit would just get the listing of all CS students for that year from university notebooks, and called them in a row. Why didn't MS forbid employees from being in their phone books or university facebooks ?
> Do test engineers and SRE get included?
Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in the credits.)
SREs is a much more interesting question ; since it's more of a "person keeping the lights on" thing than, "person who built the thing."
Then again, whose business collapses if they get their name written somewhere ?
So SAAS credits would be a "dynamic" thing, in a "credits" page that gets updated every so often. Pretty much like the credits of this week episode of any TV show is just every so slighly different that the previous weeks's one.
> Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come first or do you do it alphabetically
Alphabetically. Yes.
And if you really want to overthink it: alphabetically, organised by team / department / components / whatever, with the name of the "Head xxx" or "Xxx lead" first.
Basically, the same way you publish the org chart of some levels of your company. Since Conway's law is the only law, your org charts and your products probably have the same structure anyway.
Do companies ask people to hide the fact that they are "deputy-head-lead of quality synergies" on linkedin, in case they are poached ?
No particular deep knowledge here, but: my impression is this was a long and painful push by various unions and agents, with “top billing” becoming an actual thing to be negotiated as part of an actor’s contract, etc. Even having the end credits at all seems to be a workaround for accomodating the enormous number of people who insist on being credited: movies from the 30s seem to be perfectly content to just list the production company, the stars, and maybe the director at the start.
Of course, it takes at most a couple generations of professionals to shift from “this is a thing won through hard negotiations” to “this is a thing that everybody is entitled to by common morality”, but my point is it didn’t (appear to) start that way, it had to be squeezed out from the execs over years.
(Of course movies also don’t need maintenance or refactoring, at least not in the sense of requiring other actors and camera crews to come in.)
This is the reason why there are so many people missing on movie credits who worked on the VFX - there is no VFX union (there was a huge scheme by some very big name assholes back in the day to block it - and a huge court settlement). Watch any major Marvel or other VFX heavy film and some of the studios will get full credits for their teams while other smaller ones will just list the studio name, the VFX Supervisor (top of the chain) and a few other people. There are tons and tons missing.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&/sto...
[2] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
[3] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
Software development is supposed to be a more steady career, so the need to constantly advertise yourself isn't as pressing. That said if you want to move up and get bigger paychecks it definitely helps to get your name out there.
Do you want names of engineers on physical products too? Brand names and compliance logos are bad enough.
According to the OED, "It has been suggested that it originated as a term for a master's most able apprentice, or alternatively that it was transferred from earlier use for a member of a ship's crew, but confirmatory evidence for either of these theories appears to be lacking." The earliest known appearance of the phrase in print is 1931 from the Albuquerque Journal: "Among the electricians ... the department head is the gaffer, his first assistant is the best boy."
It's an exercise in frustration. Following the posted steps doesn't activate it in qemu or virtual pc (other vms don't seem to support Windows CE). Could be buggy virtualization, could be that it only exists in a particular version of Windows CE (judging from the date it was posted, maybe 2.11/3.0/HPC2000), or only in some OEM's custom ROM. Even if you wanted to dig into the ROM, strings are encoded in some LZ77 variant, so nothing greppable upfront. ROM dumping tools were made for extracting specific ROMs (you never know which ones and which offsets exactly), and are pretty much undocumented. Still plenty reverse engineering effort to be done.
That's new information for me! I had no idea Gabe worked for Microsoft. Another billionaire founder/CEO to add to my list of "first worked at FAANG/MANGA" (though this one does looks back pretty far back).
The FAANG/MANGA -> Startup pipeline is a good one. Learn all the technical skills and the lay of the land in a great environment, build strong connections, save up some cash, then leverage them to succeed in your own interests.
Valve did it so much better than the streaming services though. There are remarkably few games I can't get from Steam, but I need half a dozen TV streaming services to get decent show coverage.
Gabe took to heart what media companies refuse to believe: that piracy is a service problem. Make the legitimate service better and more convenient than piracy and it practically goes away overnight.
Valve has a lot of amazing things going for it: a major social component, game save backups, achievements, deep libraries of purchased content. These make the platform sticky in a marketplace with lots of alternatives. They are also smart enough to recognize Microsoft trying to choke them and they've made investments in platforms that will ensure their continued success: SteamOS, Steam Deck...
Valve also caters to the developers: easy networking, easy distribution. Lots of code you don't have to write or support.
While Netflix isn't suffering, they certainly wish they had these sorts of advantages going for them.
Netflix didn't build a monopoly on the content and franchises that legacy media companies then used to bootstrap their own competing services. After this licensing weakness became obvious, other tech companies started to encroach on the market too.
Netflix saw a way to survive the drying up of their licenses in making their own original content. Unfortunately, it's a slow and expensive process to produce media, with no guarantees of success for any given title. And it's not something that only Netflix can do, either. Anybody with money can produce content.
Netflix should have offered the ability to buy titles early on and run deep discounts on what they saw were subscription drivers. It might have cannibalized their subscription revenue and resulted in some subscribers churning, but they wouldn't be churning to other services. You'd be surprised by the number of people that subscribe to Netflix and just want to watch The Office or Parks and Rec. They could have perpetually kept these folks on the platform.
Netflix should have also built a ratings, review, library, and social component that kept viewers involved in the platform. Something not portable.
Going forward, Netflix should build tools to let content producers run faster when making content for Netflix (run a lot of operations, provide ADs, personnel, studio space, etc.) The rest of the industry is consolidating, and they need to get in on this.
Netflix also needs to get ahead of the game on new tech. Automated means to change product placements dynamically to earn even more revenue on long tail content (re)watching, etc.
Ultimately, I think film and television media is going to be disrupted by new forms of content that are orders of magnitude faster to produce, orders of magnitude cheaper, and satisfies the entire long tail of interests. If a company can get in and build a marketplace that caters to both producers and consumers, and establishes a deep moat, it will be the Valve or YouTube of future long form content.
I don't think Netflix would have had such an easy (as in straightforward or simple) time of things. Different audiences, different histories, different use cases and existing structure, etc. I like their product, but I don't know how much wiggle room they had when dealing with 'Big Film', who would have likely been heavy and in a deep trench.
Steam was 100% digital from the start, and their customers were almost guaranteed to have an internet connection on their PC, which let them make assumptions about how to move forward. Their main competition was boxed software being sold in stores. Like you say, they added value in making it more attractive for developers to put themselves on the platform, while making it more attractive for a user to be there as well.
Netflix was physical-first, and (imo) didn't really disrupt anything, but just made certain 'workflows' easier(Don't bother driving to the video store, but still pick out the movies, and just put them back in the mail) to achieve. It could have been implemented with a physical catalog and some postcards, if the web weren't as developed as it was.
I don't have hard evidence, but I think that part of their model relied on not selling, in order to keep licensing costs down. Since blank DVDs can be had cheap as dirt, why else would they charge a fee for unreturned discs? It's a way for them to show that people aren't actually buying something, which may mean that they don't need to pay as much back to the content owners.
> Netflix should build tools ...
Film studios cater to those who are creating something to be sold in some form, and don't necessarily care about the consumer at the end(imo). They're B2B, where Steam is B2B + B2C. Netflix is mostly B2C, but may still have some innovation left if they take what they're learning with Originals to build a stronger/more valuable B2B.
Fortunately for them, they only need to care about shareholder value. Users come second </s>
I like GOG enough to willingly use their Galaxy client, since they tend to provide DRM-free options, and because buying CDPR games via GOG gives them a bigger share of revenue without costing me more money or dignity.
Origin and Uplay seem to add no value for a user, and I remember a big fuss a while back about Origin scanning people's PCs a bit too eagerly. I think Ubisoft and EA also started withdrawing their newer titles from Steam and the likes to push people towards their own platforms, but that isn't consumer-friendly in the least bit.
Epic seems to have had ups and downs with their store/services. I don't use it personally, but it was not feature-complete at release[1], and they got a lot of titles on their service by making exclusivity deals, instead of by offering a better experience. Metro Exodus was a particularly stinky example of this, in that people preordered the game on Steam, only to have a timed exclusivity deal with Epic put into place shortly before release.
If I were a games developer, I don't know if the better revenue share with Epic would be worth the potential lost sales from being available everywhere, even if it were only a timed exclusivity. I'm part of the camp that just doesn't want to use certain storefronts, so why wouldn't I expect the same from my customers?
[1]: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing-the-epic-... (Because a Shopping Cart feature was apparently not necessary for their 1.0 release of a video game storefront)
I think the issue is when EA and Ubisoft bundles Uplay and Origin in the games distributed through Steam, forcing you to create a Uplay/origin account and install it. I understand why they're doing it (so that people install Uplay/origin), but I really dislike it. Also it recently prevented me from playing a Ubisoft title, as I couldn't get it to run with the last Uplay version.
> I think Ubisoft and EA also started withdrawing their newer titles from Steam and the likes to push people towards their own platforms, but that isn't consumer-friendly in the least bit.
For EA it worked so well they started putting back their games on Steam...
Nevermind the face that the game is MSRP on Steam, and Ubi had it marked down to $15 on their own platform when I checked. Gee, I wonder why the price hasn't been cut on Steam? </s>
As for EA specifically, they've been a bit of a dumpster fire for PC gamers, and have pushed a lot of 'Games are a Live Service' stuff. They've released games that are partially broken on day 1, but have their microtransaction systems fleshed out. While purchasable on Steam, their latest Battlefield game still requires an EA account, to get people onto their Epic Store. It's just a way to advertise in front of the Steam crowd, to tease them towards their platform with some discounts.
(very opinionated, if you haven't noticed)
I think the fact that Valve doesn't need to worry about being strangled by shareholders has been a major advantage for them, and has led to a higher quality service than the competition can provide
Uplay and Origin look like the a cheap ploy to try and extract more money from users in comparison.
Valve has the breathing room to do what they want. Their cash cow of Steam helps them out A LOT, since they don't even need to make games anymore. Instead, they've invested into what they think benefits the future of gaming. Who else in the games industry would make a non-locked-down VR headset, or work on anything Linux-related? Maybe indies, if they had the money.
Valve will probably make HL3 at some point, but last I heard, it was an idea waiting for the right tech. I'd rather it stay that way if it makes it better.
Why worry about downloading multiple chunks of an archive and reassembling them, or having your ISP throttle you for torrenting, or trusting the crackers of the content you're pirating when you can just wait for the game to go on sale?
I'll say, though. Elden Ring didn't work for me at launch, and I ended up refunding it(thanks, digital refund process!), but I seriously considered getting a pirated copy to see if the cracked version would work better. Anecdotal reports suggested that the anticheat (which was cracked in the pirated version) was the cause of issues for plenty of people.
Either way, CD keys used to be totally shareable, before online DRM really kicked off. You could just copy the one you got, and let someone else use it to install the game.
A downside I faced was when my CD for a game stopped working, and I had to buy the game all over again to get a new CD + key. Either key would work during the install, but I didn't have the option of just downloading the installation media, so I had to pay up.
The other time I saw this backfire was in a (temporary) LAN setting with COD4:MW. There were only so many CD keys, and you wouldn't be able to join a game where 'your' key was already active. Otherwise, it was fully-featured and fully usable!
That's not exactly that story here though. He joined MS when it was more of a (late stage) startup, not a mega-conglomerate it is today. Also, he stayed there for a looong time - 13 years. Thirdly, seeing how he joined MS in 1983 and left in 1996, he almost certainly was already rich and set for life from the MS stock when founding Valve.
(So was the 1984 Macintosh)
Uh, what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Lep...
As long as the temperature was high enough, there was a balance between annihilation reactions of electrons and positrons and generation of electron-positron pairs.
After the temperature decreased a lot, much lower than the temperature where the protons and all the neutrons that had not decayed yet had combined into nuclei of helium and lithium, all the positrons annihilated with most of the electrons, so only a much smaller number of electrons survived.
After further cooling, most of the electrons became bound to nuclei, and all the matter became plasma, like most of the matter in the present universe still is (because most of the matter is inside the stars).
When electrons bind to nuclei, a plasma turns into a neutral gas, this happened in the recombination phase. The neutral gas then collapsed into stars which turned the gas making up the stars back into plasma. Also the energetic photons emitted by stars started turning the remaining gas back into a plasma which is called the reionization phase.
The earlier section says that the electromagnetic force didn't exist in its current form until 10*-12 seconds or so, when the electromagnetic and weak forces split from a combined "electroweak" force into their current forms.
According to Brooks, the hidden dialog was placed in encrypted form at the end of the smiley bitmap file included with the operating system. Back in 1985, there weren't actually any tools that could discover this kind of extra data.
I think Firefox on iOS uses webkit and doesn’t support addons. There is firefox focus which does block ads but also only supports one tab at a time.
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-content-blockers-saf...
IIRC because I think that's what I did before I had a PiHole doing most of that, but I can't remember for sure.