Best Easter Eggs and Other Software Surprises 233
the_insult_dog writes "Computerworld has an article up (with videos) about some of the coolest Easter eggs and other software surprises, ranging from full-featured games to strange messages from robots. What other eggs are out there? What's the coolest egg ever?"
emacs (Score:2, Interesting)
M-x; tetris
Anyone remember Terminate, the comm program? (Score:2, Interesting)
Terminate was primarily a BBS dialer, but it had a hidden feature/easter egg in early versions. With the right combination, it would switch into a Wargames mode, ie "Greetings Professor Falken." If you went through the prompts, it unlocked a wardialer feature. That's useful to some, but I just found the Wargames part really amusing.
Best was in Excel 4.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Trademark infringement? (Score:2, Interesting)
GNU Emacs isn't licensed by The Tetris Company. Calling a Free tetromino game "Tetris" be like calling an OS based on GNOME and WINE "Microsoft Windows". Ordinarily, changing the name would fix things, as I did with my own tetromino game [pineight.com]. But if Tetris prevails in Tetris v. BioSocia [gamasutra.com], might the company use the precedent to attack the Free Software Foundation?
Coolest: the Amiga OS (Score:5, Interesting)
You had to hold five keys and first insert a disk then eject it again. (left control and shift, right control and shift, any function key--each key had a message but adding the disk offered the best...)
Upon insertion you saw on the Workbench 1.2 title bar, "We made the Amiga"
Upon removal: "They fucked it up"
1.3 removed the profanity/message and it ironically became "Born a champion", then "Still a champion".
Matlab (Score:2, Interesting)
>> why
She knew it was a good idea.
>> why
Because the system manager told me to.
>> why
Barney suggested it.
>> why
To please a very terrified and smart and tall engineer.
>> why
How should I know?
Re:Old hewlett packard equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost all the old HP silicon has artwork drawn on it. The hallways of the plant where Dad worked were lined with photomicrographs of chip art. It was easier to get away with this when the fab was in the basement, so your whole chip, from design to packaging, was in-house and you personally knew all the people involved in it.
Atari Adventure (Score:2, Interesting)
Fishy goodness with VMware (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how, but for a while I had the fish trapped in one of my VMware sessions, which oddly enough was running WinXP. I'd freed the fish on the host desktop, but when the fish appeared in the VM when it was in full-screen mode, and I then minimized the VM, the fish got trapped in there somehow.
Cheers,
Re:Videos? (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought emacs had MacOSX built-in.
Re:Best was in Excel 4.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
I many times add easter eggs when I wrote commercial video games.
I added myself, and my GF (now wife) to Wayne's World (Gameboy.) http://www.cheatscodesguides.com/game-boy-cheats/waynes-world/ [cheatscodesguides.com]
Then I added a complete racing game to Grid Runner (PS1, Saturn, W95.) http://www.cheatbook.de/cfiles/gridrunnerplaystation1.htm [cheatbook.de]
And some other things, many still secret. Publishers don't like it so much these days.... kind of takes the fun out of writing games....
yo.
H-P ScanJet Hardware Easter Egg (Score:2, Interesting)
A clever group at H-P made a scanner that when powered up while holding the "Scan" button and the SCSI address at zero would play Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". The motor's drive speed determined the pitch of the note played. I loved showing that one off to my friends that were lucky enough to own one, especially because I didn't.
The one that changed my Life (Score:3, Interesting)
In early MacPaint successor FullPaint [wikipedia.org] by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.
Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars [ericweisstein.com] and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.
The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars [ericweisstein.com] where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100
I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position [meme.com.au] on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work [transforum.net] with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 [sf.net] running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.