You might think, huh? What the hell does an Easter Egg have to do with software? Read on. I haven’t much doubt that
you’ll find this both interesting and entertaining.
Yo, what is it?
Most people never give an ounce of thought to the people who programmed the stuff on their PC. Software is not
magic. It has to be written by someone. Everything from Windows Minesweeper to Adobe Photoshop has to be written by
a programmer or a large bunch of programmers. Contrary to what some may think, these people are just that…people.
They have personalities, too. Now, imagine these programmers, sitting in a cubicle, programming away. Do you think
they’re just going to sit there and code all day? No, not without putting, perhaps, a few little hidden gems into
the software.
This is what an Easter Egg is. Its some little hidden function buried into legit software titles. The location or
access methods to these functions are not publicized. It takes a leak or some dork with a lot of time to find them.
But, you’ll be suprised (as I was at first) just how many software titles have Easter Eggs in them. I guarantee you
that you have several on your computer right now. Easter Eggs can consist of dumb little gags to full games hidden
within the software. A lot of times, the functions do something that suits the programmer’s personality. Sometimes
they poke at their competitors. Its prety funny stuff.
This Easter Egg thing (they are also sometimes called gang sceens) started back in the 70′s, in the days of Unix.
Certain command line utilities in Unix would greet the user with some little greeeting or something like that. As
technology progressed, we moved into Windows and other graphical operating systems. This has given programmers the
ability to add graphics and even sound to their Easter Eggs.
Programmers don’t generally try to overrun the sofwtare with Eggs. They know, of course, that people would get
really annoyed if these Eggs bloated the code even more or hogged any resources. I’m not aware of any cases where
an Egg drew down resources at all. Generally, the quality-testing teams are not aware of these Eggs before granting
approval to the product, but, still, these Eggs are small and do not pose a problem. Hell, sometimes they can even
be used as a marketing ploy: people hear about an egg, then try the product, find the egg, like the product, buy
it. Its not outside of the realm of possiblity.
There are sites on the net totally dedicated to posting newly found eggs. I’ll post a few links at the end of this
article.
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