Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Easter Egg? (slashdot.org)

One year ago, Easter Sunday was greeted with the news that many companies were increasingly cracking down on "Easter Eggs," like the harmless snippets of vanity code playfully hidden by developers. "As programming becomes more corporate, more official, one cannot appear to have code that is not officially sanctioned," the author of The Elements of Computing Style told the BBC, though other programmers they spoke to disagreed.

The Easter Egg is a tradition which dates back at least to a hidden room in a 1979 Atari game, and I still have fond memories of the Batmobile Easter Egg (video) in King's Quest II (1985) and tales of that weird musical Easter Egg in Windows 95 which scrolled the names of their entire development team.

So share your favorites in the comments. What's your favorite Easter Egg?

Comments

Re:DEC easter eggs

[KGIII]

Seeing as this is Slashdot and there's no Cowboy Easter Egg... I'll have to go with:

sudo apt-get moo

And, because Slashdot eats the text formatting, here's a picture:
http://i.imgur.com/BGXbVxZ.png

A)bort, R)etry, F)ail

[Blaskowicz]

It was a stupid mind game that DOS let you play when you were stuck because of bad sectors on a floppy. In retrospect, that was a rather bad and unfunny Easter egg!

Aptitude

[DrYak]

# aptitude moo
There are no Easter Eggs in this program.
# aptitude -v moo
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.
# aptitude -vv moo
Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?
# aptitude -vvv moo
Stop it!
# aptitude -vvvv moo
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?
# aptitude -vvvvv moo
All right, you win.

                               /----\
                       -------/      \
                      /               \
                     /                |
   -----------------/                  --------\

# aptitude -vvvvvv moo
What is it?  It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.