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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?
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?
My favorite Easter egg is the Hershey's chocolate eggs with the blue foil wrapper.
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.
"Created by ... Warren Robineet"
Forever burned into my brain.
The flight simulator in MS Excel 97 (I think)...
At least on the Apple II version, if you inserted the game disk upside down, the game booted and played upside down.
As seen in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ed
The first two bytes of every MS-DOS .EXE was the signature "MZ", which happened to be the initials of a Microsoft developer.
Kinda like how technical book authors like to slip in their own names in script code examples... only MZ got his wired permanently into *every single* DOS app.
Within excel
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Aw, looks like part of our shared cultural heritage has been lost.
I remember when Slashdot had hidden SIDs (story IDs), which were IDs that could be entered in the URL and would take you to a discussion that wasn't actually part of a story and wasn't shown on the front page or any section page. One of those was trolltalk, which was a hidden SID dedicated to discussion about trolling Slashdot. I'm not aware of this being documented on Slashdot, but trolls (and others, no doubt) were aware of it and used it. I'd say it qualifies as an Easter Egg.
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!
Try it on a Mac.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In python2.7 interactive mode:
>>> from __future__ import braces
File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
It has been a long time since I have fallen for a Goatse Troll, congrats! Sadly it looks like the site has been taken down. I wonder how many hits that page got, that's a very large opening to fill!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
# 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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
An ATM-type machine developed by an ex-employer used to play Silent Night on Christmas Eve by spinning its motors. Unfortunately, that model is no longer in use. :-(
In MacOS 7.5, drag and drop the "secret about box" text snippet to the trash, and get a waving MacOS flag. Wind direction and force is controlled by mouse position.
I recently picked up a used HP 54600B oscilloscope and whilst searching for the manual came across a "three finger salute" that launches a fully playable version of tetris [ http://www.eeggs.com/items/392... ]. I wonder how many hardware engineering hours were spent "debugging" hardware during the 90's with one of these. I also wonder how this slipped through code reviews.
Around 30 years ago, I was one of the lead developers for the first query server for Unisys V-Series/Medium Systems. The product (named Exxtract(tm) ) would display a little "text picture", on the system console (ODT) at midnight Christmas Day of a small Christmas Tree, with presents around it, and at midnight new Years Eve/New Year's Day would display a little text picture of a couple glasses of Champagne, along with the words to "Auld Lang Syne", and best wishes from M. V. and Associates. No harm done, and we usually got some sort of pleasant comment from the customers after their first time seeing the messages. Also, if the server ever detected a fatal/impossible/irrecoverable error, it would memory dump, and display the message "And Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash - Where *EVER* you are!" We got more squawks when people saw that one, though it was probably more related to the crash than the message, per se.