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Easter Eggs
| Easter egg: /n./ [From the custom of the Easter Egg
hunt observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden in
the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons
disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic, or sound effect
emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented
set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits.
One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to
respond to the command make love with not war?. Many personal computers have
much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers'
names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics
images of the entire development team.
No one's certain exactly when this practice started,but Easter eggs have been cropping up in computer hardware and software for at least a couple of decades. For certain, many cartridges for the Atari 2600 game system (introduced in 1977) contained Easter eggs. Early Apple Macintoshes and Commodore Amigas also were known to have some eggs hidden in their system software. (One Amiga egg reportedly included several Amiga developers' decidedly negative--and rather obscene--take of Commodore's management of the Amiga line.) Since then, nearly every major operating system and software program has been home to at least one egg. There are even vague stories of eggs hiding in early electronic calculators. Not every egg is simply a scrolling list of programmers, either. One of the more interesting eggs showed up in the first release of Maxis's SimCopter last year. The flight sim game includes a marching band and nubile young women who celebrate when you complete a level. One gay programmer was upset over the stereotyping of all game players as men who like buxom women, so he put in some bare-chested studs who kiss in celebration. Maxis didn't see much humor in the egg, fired the programmer, and removed the boys from later shipments of the game. Other companies don't have much use for eggs of any kind. Developers at Intuit, maker of the popular Quicken line of products, say they'd rather spend time fixing bugs than adding eggs. And Nico Mak, maker of WinZip, states that his team would rather add more features to the product than waste time with eggs. (And if you're downloading software online, wouldn't you like to know you aren't wasting time gathering useless code?) Other companies are less strict, however. Most notably Microsoft... Microsoft would not comment on any type of Easter egg policy and probably would prefer to keep these matters internal. You can't really blame them. Judging by our findings, the company has created some whoppers (check out the Windows 95 and Excel 97 eggs to see what we mean), and some users might like to know exactly why the company allows such huge eggs to bloat already big applications even further. For whatever reason, here they are. Easter Eggs Part 1 Easter Eggs Part 2 Easter Eggs Part 3 Easter Eggs Part 4 Easter Eggs Part 5 Easter Eggs Part 6 |