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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.
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
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.
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'
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.
Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
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.
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
If it only had a text editor...
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.
Lots of closed-source apps have a bunch of extra undocumented code that could be possible security vulnerabilities.
That's no egg, it's a space station!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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).