Long live software Easter eggs | Hacker News Reader

Long live software Easter eggs

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87 pointsrbanffy25 comments

I stuck an easter egg into one of my game cartridges. The egg was underwhelming (just my initials), but I wanted to prove that it was me who wrote the title. The hand on the cave wall, you know? "I was here" for future generations. Almost literally true, because it took like 25 years for someone to find it.

For another cartridge, Atari gave me permission to do an easter egg, and somehow it just wasn't very much fun and I didn't do it -- I guess part of the thrill was breaking the rules. The first egg was really hard to find because official company policy (probably never enforced, but hey) that it was a firing offense. Once Marketing got involved it just wasn't fun anymore.

The Apple Newton has some well-documented easter eggs. My favorite is the one involving an anagram of our absolutely bonkers GM, Gaston Bastiaens: If you wrote and selected the text "Neat Bong" and then hit the "Assist" button, it put up a list of some of the group's malcontents. Hiding that one in the source code control system was fun. There are others, it was a relatively big ROM for the day :-)

Ah, you must have worked with Howard Scott Warshaw back in the day. He put his initials into his games as well, didn't he?

Different group; I know him but did not work with him. Not really sure what, if any, easter eggs he stuck into his titles. Frankly I'm not sure he had space on the 2600 console, that thing was tiny.

Easter eggs were always fun and handy to impress your friends.

Thanks to an Easter egg in Photoshop, I got my 2nd job, an entry into the world of the Internet. While waiting for my interview, I did some design of a mosaic of the splash images and the other from the Easter egg. The CEO/Director saw that and asked me how I did the trick. I start the following month.

Not really an Easter egg, but in Windows 3x (I think or WIN95), the startup and shutdown splash screens are just bitmaps (.bmp) and are easily editable in Paint. In the 90s, there was a high-profile computer showcase in our hometown. My friends and I dressed in school uniforms and could quickly get in. As a show-off to my friends, I edited the BMPs in Paint and freaked out the organizers (I backed/copied the originals next to the edited one). My friends think I'm the Hackerman.

Love this memory, thanks for sharing. I remember doing the same thing to school computers. The challenge was being subtle enough to avoid detection from the teaching staff, but funny enough to be noticed and appreciated by the rest of the students. Funny being entirely subjective, of course!

Ah fun days! I just used to swap the startup and shutdown screens by renaming them to each other. The look of confusion on peoples faces as they clicked 'shutdown' and were faced with a 'Windows 95 is starting up' screen was priceless.

My favorite easter egg is the flight simulator in Excel 97. Last year I ported it to the web, and wrote an essay about the era of software development it came from:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg

I should add that Ed Fries, widely known for his role in the development of the Xbox and its impact on the console gaming market, has been repairing and reverse engineering old arcade cabinets in an effort to shed light on the earliest instances of many software engineering phenomena, including the earliest easter eggs. And his articles are a great read!

https://edfries.wordpress.com

Ed himself was responsible for at least a couple easter eggs in the earlier versions of Microsoft's Office applications. Here's more from him about that era in the industry:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/research/ed_fries_1_...

Here is a counterpoint:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/archive/blogs/larryosterman...

It paid off: Microsoft's software is well-known to avoid bloat and be transparent to the user. /s

[GIF of Jennifer Lawrence sarcastically agreeing]

I've read this piece before. It's all very well for MS to get on their high horses about Easter Eggs but this quote in particular, at the very beginning, seriously grinds my gears:

"One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer."

Then explain to me why my laptop is always running the fans. Explain to me why there's always some OS-related background process chewing CPU and draining the battery. Explain the lack of transparency and control I have over these processes. Explain to me why such processes are "essential" when neither macOS or Linux behave similarly. Explain to me why Windows 11 is slow and unstable. Explain to me why it appears to be engineered to actively thwart my attempts to get useful work done.

Trustworthy, my eye.

Their whole line of reasoning is faulty BS built on a false premise.

It was true when they wrote the rule back in NT 4 days I suspect. It might have been true still in 2005 when they wrote that blog post.

Now it’s an embarrassing shit show.

Trustworthy Computing means that you have the choice to trust Microsoft, as they vend the entire OS - and assuming you actually pay the big bucks[0], you can also be certain the data on the OS isn't being used for advertising purposes.

Windows provides trustworthy computing, but by no means is it required. iOS is the opposite of this where you're forced to trust Apple, which comes with UX inconveniences.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compare-micros...

Yeah MS is full of shit. No one should be trusting windows at this point. Windows had its fair share of easter eggs anyway (at least up until NT) and more recently I saw this one: https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/gxgyvd/i_think_i_f...

Thanks for your counterpoint parent.

Just before Mike Nelson shit himself in the car on the way home last night, I pointed out to him that what his generation calls "Easter Eggs" are often just security flaws that can be used to fingerprint the internet traffic of dissidents, and that his cavalier attitude towards data privacy is why they had to close the Russian Consultate in Seattle.

(Or maybe the above is creative nonfiction, and your hands deserve to shake if you make this poster explain the joke.)

Microsoft: "no undocumented features"

also Microsoft: adds a hidden linker option in 2019 and nothing about it is known until 2022 in a community forum post[0]

0: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-linker-opt...

Back in the 00s we put an easter egg into our mall kiosk wayfinding software. If you pulled up the software keyboard and typed in the name of the company it would show a card deck animation of our pictures. That was always fun to pull out. Used to have tons of them in the Westfield and Stockland malls across Oz. Wild to even think about how long ago that was.

I put a huge egg into my biggest project, a game, that is actually meaningful and useful. Still nobody seem to have discovered it (at least publicly). Maybe it'll be worth to write about.

Long live fun software!

I absolutely love software easter eggs. Though I was surprised to not see my very favorite one, the LOTRO hobbit and squirrels in the Easter Egg Archive website. I tried to submit it, but submissions are paused.

Anyone else here know this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czs2tNymtqY

Apropos the header image, there's also `traceroute bad.horse` (you may need to pass --resolve-hostnames depending on your version)

I have a memory of an Easter egg that I enjoyed when I was a kid, 20 or so years ago. Wonder if anyone else can remember it.

It involved clicking a metallic (?) dot somewhere on the UI and it would pop out and could be dragged and thrown about with bouncing physics.

I feel like it might have been audacity? Can anyone remember what I'm talking about?

we had an easter egg in a web app i was the PM for. you could access the "pirate" translation by going to oursite.com/pirate/login, versus oursite.com/en/login (or any other language). the easter egg is over a decade old now and it's still there. i'll visit the site once in a while to get a good chuckle. :D aargg!

i added an easter egg to one of the mobile app in my old company. since i'm the only developer and no one care to review the code, it remain there until now.

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