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

The original

[denis.goddard]

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

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.

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.

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.