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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!
Faberge: best Easter eggs ever. Thought everyone knew that.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
I thought I was going to die when he kept retyping (slowly)
aptitude -v moo
instead of just hitting the up arrow on his keyboard. What's worse, he missed a part of the Easter egg. You get another bit of text if you -vvvvvv or more.
Somehow it didn't stop me from watching all of the videos though.
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)
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."
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
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.
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.