Slashdot Mirror
Best Easter Eggs and Other Software Surprises
the_insult_dog writes "Computerworld has an article up (with videos) about some of the coolest Easter eggs and other software surprises, ranging from full-featured games to strange messages from robots. What other eggs are out there? What's the coolest egg ever?"
http://www.roadsideattractions.ca/egg.htm
What's the coolest egg ever?
Phrase your answer in the form of a tweet. "OMG gt2B SWbxSET3".
What is this? Tweeny-Cutie magazine?
I enjoy a fun easter-egg but this is asinine.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
M-x; tetris
Terminate was primarily a BBS dialer, but it had a hidden feature/easter egg in early versions. With the right combination, it would switch into a Wargames mode, ie "Greetings Professor Falken." If you went through the prompts, it unlocked a wardialer feature. That's useful to some, but I just found the Wargames part really amusing.
uggh what a horrible spam submission is this a domain squatters site ?
loads of adverts and 1 eegg on each single page, desperate for revenue much? ill be glad when adblock finishes these domains off for good, no value at all.
anyway http://eeggs.com/ is the source where they have cut and pasted their content from
The best one was in Excel 4.0 where you could make a Lotus 123 bitmap appear, have bugs crawl out of it, and an Excel bitmap appear and kick the Lotus one away. It was back in the day when people didn't "get in trouble" for putting in Easter Eggs.
The Reese's peanut butter egg.
With the deviled egg tied for a close second with eggs benedict.
On the about / register splash screen type:
a r n i e
The picture of the creator turns into a picture of a stuffed dinosaur, presumably names Arnie.
Various Photoshop splash logos in the past have had hidden images.
Typically you would have to grab a screenshot of the splash logo and then do CMYK separation, fiddle with brightness/contrast, grid masking, etc. to see the images.
How do you make the fucking fish go away?!!?
^^ Incredible.
Netherlanders == Nerds
Jeeze, can't we do stuff without videos any more?
Blocked at work.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Well, Since the slashdot army has brought down eeggs.com, I guess we'll never know which egg is the best of all time. But I do remember a hidden flight simulator in Microsoft excel way back in the day
How about the rediscovery of Charles Darwin's egg just in time for Easter?
About the bird itself, Darwin's notes commented that the flesh was "most delicately white" when cooked. They just don't make Naturalists like that any more! :)
Faberge: best Easter eggs ever. Thought everyone knew that.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Jesus Christ, that guy's voice is annoying. And he types like a retarded chip, to boot!
What about the old sega master system trick to get the snail game by holding Up, buttons 1 and 2 simultaneously and powering on the system.
This is somewhere between an easter egg and a surprise. Beating the Call of Duty: World at War single player mode and being patient enough for the credits to end unlocks a mini-game: Zombie Survival that you can play solo or co-op with upto 3 other players.
Lot of fun, adds to the game value (and kinda apologizes for the quality of multiplayer offering).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJwYmxaZ-9I - Found on youtube.
Found out the game mode purely by accident after I beat the single player mode and went to make a sandwich...A lot of gamers knew it and it was all over the web but I was oblivious to that part which made it a nice surprise.
Works on Debian, of course. Maybe Ubuntu, too.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
There's an easter egg in the "About" window of Line 6's new POD Farm... if you know how to find it.
My favorite easter egg would probably have to be the Palm OS taxi cab. I love watching that little thing go across the screen pretty randomly.
GNU Emacs isn't licensed by The Tetris Company. Calling a Free tetromino game "Tetris" be like calling an OS based on GNOME and WINE "Microsoft Windows". Ordinarily, changing the name would fix things, as I did with my own tetromino game. But if Tetris prevails in Tetris v. BioSocia , might the company use the precedent to attack the Free Software Foundation?
fuck computerworld, 80 adverts for a single pages worth of crappy eggs ?
enjoy unemployment fuckers
Star Wars game
1. Go to the spreadsheet application in the OpenOffice suite
2. Go to any cell
3. Type in: =game()
The response will be "say what?"
4. Type in: =GAME("StarWars")
5. Press the enter key -- the opening screen shows up
6. Pick your icon -- a message will appear in German
7. Pick your level (again, in German)
8. Click 'start'
Wanda the fish
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: free the fish
Gegls from outer space
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: gegls from outer space
No Easter eggs here
1. On Debian-based Linux distros, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in: aptitude moo
3. After the response, type: Aptitude -v moo
4. After the response, type: Aptitude -v -v moo
5. (At this point, after the computer program argues with you, you're just adding one more -v each time.) Remember that five is your lucky number!
Robots
1. In Firefox 3, go to the Location bar
2. Type in: about:robots
Star Wars movie
Not technically an Easter egg, but still cool
1. In Windows XP (or any OS that supports Telnet), click Start, then Run
2. Type in: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Terminal Tetris
This actually is a function of the emacs text editor. Type "doctor" at the prompt and you'll get a free session with a psychotherapist.
1. On the Mac, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type: emacs
3. Press Escape & X at the same time
4. After your cursor moves to the bottom, type Tetris
Book of Mozilla
1. In Firefox location box, type: about:mozilla
Crazy Dates
Again, perhaps not really an Easter egg (though a lot of people on the Web think it is)
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in the 'ddate' command followed by a date in the format of number, space, number, space, four-digit year number (for instance: 4 6 2009)
3. Each time you type in a different date, you get another bizarre response from the 'Discordian' calendar
Pipes screensaver
1. In the Google Chrome Web browser's location bar, type in: about:internets
Have you mooed today?
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accesories > Terminal
2. Type in the apt-get package manager command and a bovine parameter: apt-get moo
You had to hold five keys and first insert a disk then eject it again. (left control and shift, right control and shift, any function key--each key had a message but adding the disk offered the best...)
Upon insertion you saw on the Workbench 1.2 title bar, "We made the Amiga"
Upon removal: "They fucked it up"
1.3 removed the profanity/message and it ironically became "Born a champion", then "Still a champion".
My favorite was when I was running Visual Studio inside a Virtual PC environment. I was doing some PDA programming and was going to deploy it to the PDA/Phone emulator in Visual Studio. Apparently there's a problem (hard to believe) running a virtual environment inside a virtual environment. When trying to run it, it threw a visual studio exception followed by the message "You just had to try it didn't you".
I'm a satanic clam.
With the right keystrokes in Quark, an alien will walk onto the screen and blast the selected object out of existence. Try it enough times and much larger and more impressive alien will appear!
One of my favorite easter eggs to date would have to be the tetris game hidden on the HP 54600B oscilloscope. It made my EE classes in college that much more interesting.
Where if you typed something in a cell near the far right, you got a driving game. With guns in your car to shoot other cars.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
That a lot of open source apps have a bunch of extra undocumented code that could be possible security vulnerability.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From the "up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-select-start" department?
Surely you meant "b-a." I'm pretty sure a-b didn't do anything. :)
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
In any Linux distro get a terminal and type sudo \rm -rf /
Have fun.
bash: sudo: command not found
In Mac OS 7.5 - 8.5, you could get easter eggs by typing the text "secret about box" into any text editor that supported drag & drop and text clippings, selecting the text and dragging it to the desktop. In one OS, it would start a "brick-out" type game with the developer's names.
Because they're wankers with the "one thing per advertising filled page"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
-Styopa
Compared to the magic dot in Adventure or good old SYS 32800,123,45,6 these eggs are pretty weak.
Is this why OpenOffice is so bloated?
In ArcGIS by ESRI you used to be able to type "jerry" while in an edit session to make a small photo of Jerry Garcia appear in the upper left of your map data frame. Unfortunately, they took it out, but it was fun while it lasted.
Just ask "why"
>> why
She knew it was a good idea.
>> why
Because the system manager told me to.
>> why
Barney suggested it.
>> why
To please a very terrified and smart and tall engineer.
>> why
How should I know?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
the best easter egg of all time has to be
in Adventure for the Atari vcs... get the hidden dot
and go through the line to reveal "created by warren robinette" as seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVbu2BssrzE
ScuttleMonkey, your geek card is revoked for getting the Konami code wrong. Shame on you!
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
1. Star Wars game in OpenOffice
2. Wanda the fish in Ubuntu
3. Gegls from outer space in Ubuntu
4. "No Easter Eggs here" in Debian
5. Firefox robots
6. telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (not really easter egg?)
7. Tetris in Emacs (easter egg???)
8. firefox: about:mozilla
9. ddate in Linux
10. pipes screensaver in chrome
11. apt-get moo in Debian.
There. I Read The Fantastic Article (rtFa) for you.
Quite frankly I think they are all dumb.
The HP Oscilloscopes used in my EE Circuits lab had a hidden Tetris game. It was a great way to have the Lab TA give you a funny look.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/28801.html
Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
I think things like this are even cooler.
Skyfox: hitting Control-G in flight switched from flying an advanced fighter plane to playing a game of Space Invaders.
Karateka: booting the game disk with the label side down played the game with all the graphics flipped vertically.
There was another which was just a cartoon image of the author of the game having his head chopped off by another person. I don't recall the game, except that this easter egg was included in all the games he wrote, including games for the Apple IIgs.
There was another program for the Apple IIgs that, if you did a scan for deleted files, there was a paint program with menus in French that could be recovered.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Hot Coffee?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
My dad designed HP test equipment, along with some other clever people. When they had extra space in ROM they'd put in things that would trigger if you pushed the right buttons on power-up.
One of my function generators plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" if you know what to push and when. (And you have an 8 ohm speaker plugged into the output.)
As it so happens, this was such a spectacular usage of the machine -- taking a single-output function generator and getting it to produce four-part harmony by synthesizing waveforms with embedded harmonics -- that when a sales engineer found out about it he started showing it off, and pretty soon it had stopped being an easter egg and started being a front-line sales demo.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
put a slash and a dot in the address bar of opera
I like the way it has a "Try Again" button. If you press it, it says "Please do not press this button again" (Hitchhiker's Guide style), and then it disappears if you do.
Nautilus: Not sure what version this is, but in some recent version, if you clicked "clear history" in the "go" menu, with some low probability instead of the standard message it would say, "Are you sure you want to forget history?" and then in small text, "If you do, you will be doomed to repeat it."
Mac OS X: hold shift as you trigger expose, open a folder or dock a window. The animation plays in slow motion.
SSH: if your /etc/password is munged (the local one, not the one on the server), then the ssh client will tell you "You don't exist, go away!"
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
There are loads in Photoshop, but the only two I can remember off the top of my head are: holding alt down when going to Photoshop -> About Photoshop and getting a (usually feline-related) alternative splash screen, and holding down alt while selecting "Layer options" in the Layers palette, resulting in a dialogue box saying "Merlin Lives!" with a cute icon.
My UID is prime. Is yours?
http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/quests/cow.shtml The cow level was hilarious. I still break out laughing sometimes just thinking about it.
Lots of closed-source apps have a bunch of extra undocumented code that could be possible security vulnerabilities.
The "invisible grey dot". I think I actually found this egg by myself. I crapped my 8yr old pants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(Atari_2600)
Back in the day when people actually made funny games, at one point where no would would think to go it prompts you to insert three floppies successively, three floppies which don't exist. Any game whose users would find that hilarious is great in my book.
I guess the same can be said for that entire series.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Figures. The day after mine points expire.
Quack, quack.
Like other commenters in this thread, I'm amazed that visiting a website counts even as an "almost" Easter egg. I guess you can sort of make it fit the pattern of a typical Easter egg: if you go into your Web browser—an innocuous, everyday application—and type the "special code" (i.e., some URL) into the address bar, you see funny cartoons. I guess it seems more like an Easter egg to typical Windows users if you use telnet, because it's unfamiliar and un-graphicky. God forbid they ever get a hold of Lynx, the whole damned Internet will count as a funny surprise.
The Emacs ones are almost as lame. Tetris and the psychotherapist aren't Easter eggs; they're documented features. And not the most offbeat ones in Emacs by a long shot. They even appear in the default pull-down menus in the windowed versions! A better, more obscure one for Emacs is M-x hanoi-unix, which is a countdown to the Year 2038 bug expressed as a puzzle.
I'm not sure how, but for a while I had the fish trapped in one of my VMware sessions, which oddly enough was running WinXP. I'd freed the fish on the host desktop, but when the fish appeared in the VM when it was in full-screen mode, and I then minimized the VM, the fish got trapped in there somehow.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Adventure.
I worked for Siemens Energy and Automation years ago. They had a UNIX-based energy management system called Sinaut Spectrum with a window manager process called "woman" (makes sense). There was a keyboard combination that would pop up a display of a naked woman. It wasn't a photograph, but a black-and-white artist's sketch. I would be very surprised if that easter egg was not still alive in many electric utility control rooms.
The DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) command line editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) has a command "make" which is used to create a file. If you create a file called "love" from within the editor, the editor asks you "Not war?" before proceeding.
All the easter eggs are documented.
Pinball games are full of them and cows as well.
I would say, the best Easter egg would be a piece of well written software, that did one job, and did it well.
Easter eggs are nice, but programmers often spend more time working on those, than ensuring the quality and functionality of their software.
for once, I'd like to see something 'just work'.
Invisible throws, handcuffs, the lot. Made the game a bit more fun when you got bored with it.
Use it!
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.
while on /. press the Alt and f4 keys together.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Spoken like a true MBA that makes a product that enables oppressive forces to track and kill fleeing protesters and innocent bystanders.
I hope A piece of you dies every time an innocent person your equipment tracks is killed.
LOL I just found that the other day! Is there a way to get to that part of the game quickly? I haven't played it since I beat it.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Classic story, from a previous slashdot post:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1045201&cid=25919333
This link if you don't want your 1-page article spread over 11 ad-filled subpages:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
A clever group at H-P made a scanner that when powered up while holding the "Scan" button and the SCSI address at zero would play Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". The motor's drive speed determined the pitch of the note played. I loved showing that one off to my friends that were lucky enough to own one, especially because I didn't.
# rm -rf /
rm: cannot remove root directory "/"
Nowadays you need --no-preserve-root for that.
This blue screen pops up with all this cool programmer jargon!
In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.
Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.
The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100
I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
...in many games, etering "iddqd" did result in a self-kill.
Oh, and by the way, does anyone else remember "idspispopd"? It is stuck in my head since back then, and despite the fact, that in Doom 2, it was "idclip"...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
2.) No-risk environments are rarely competitive.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The Dopefish Lives!
Invisible "black" dot. 8-bit graphics. Stickin' it to "the man" for much deserved credit. A classic from the Atari age.
source: http://www.eeggs.com/items/20664.html
A friend of mine once discovered that by starting The Incredible Machine (the "Rube Goldberg's machine" game) on halloween, a carved pumpkin would appear in your inventory. I first thought the guy was kidding me but there it was. Very cool. Today a quick googling tells that there's also some special item for Christmas and St. Patrick's Day.