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

DEC easter eggs

[VAXcat]

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...

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

Re:DEC easter eggs

[KGIII]

Which is probably a rip off of something else, somewhere down the line - until you find that we're still cracking the same jokes as Plato and our graffiti has been the same thing for thousands of years.

Remember, you're unique - just like everybody else.

The original

[denis.goddard]

"Created by ... Warren Robineet" Forever burned into my brain.

flight simulator

[Anonymous Coward]

The flight simulator in MS Excel 97 (I think)...

Doom in Excel 95

[PhineusJWhoopee]

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

DOS MZ header

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Flight simulator

[aglider]

Within excel

Re:Ubuntu Easter Eggs

[rasmusbr]

Aw, looks like part of our shared cultural heritage has been lost.

Hidden SIDs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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!

python2.7

[rekoil]

In python2.7 interactive mode:
>>> from __future__ import braces
    File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance

Re:Ubuntu Easter Eggs

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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!

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.