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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the hopping-down-the-funny-trail dept.

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?

4 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. DEC easter eggs by VAXcat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in the day, when we slew the dinosaurs with our slide rules, DEC had a product that ran on PDP11s and VAXes called Datatrieve. It was a query and reporting language, with extensive help. If you typed "Help me", it would reply that "Datatrieve is not in the counseling business - you should see a therapist, Priest, or Rabbi". Datatrieve help also had the feature that if you wanted more detailed help on a subject, you could type HELP ADVANCED subject, and it would give more detail on the subject. If you typed "Help advanced me", it would rely that "you are not advanced". A DEC executive got wind of this, and demanded that it be removed. It was removed in the next release - at which point DEC was deluged with problem reports from customers, complaining that it had been removed.... Datatrieve help would also reply to request for the subject of Wombats...

    --
    There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
  2. Karateka by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At least on the Apple II version, if you inserted the game disk upside down, the game booted and played upside down.

  3. Doom in Excel 95 by PhineusJWhoopee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As seen in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ed

  4. Flight simulator by aglider · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Within excel

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.