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?"

Comments

Best Egg Ever

[Akoman]

http://www.roadsideattractions.ca/egg.htm

this is a spam submission

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Best was in Excel 4.0

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OMFG

[geminidomino]

How do you make the fucking fish go away?!!?

Zombies...

[atari2600]

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.

Re:Videos?

[RebootKid]

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'

11 pages and over 80 adverts later

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Visual Studio device emulator

[clam666]

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".

Re:telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

[Hurricane78]

As another poster noted: Go to South America and say you are American. They will say "Well, I'm American too. South American."
They in fact would call you "United Statians".

Point is: You chose a totally egocentric name for your country. You are not the only country in America, you know? So Americans is already taken. Sorry. Choose something else, or accept "United Statians". Because even if it sounds very stupid, that is what you chose. So be angry at yourselves, not us.

By the way: Why don't you simply split into two countries. You know, with two completely different philosophies in your country, this would make everyone happy. You could still collaborate where you agree on things. And you could give the two new countries better names. :)