Easter Eggs

Many years ago (around 1985) I was sitting at a PDP-11 console waiting for the machine to boot (something that required over an hour in those days) and it came up to a prompt. I typed in some curse word because I was very upset at being woken up at that late hour to drive to the client and reboot their system. To my surprise the machine responded with something like "watch your mouth". Huh?

I remember later how much fun it was to find a very complete, three page reference on, of all things, wombats. Digital Equipment Corporation (since assimilated by the Borg, er, Compaq) had a database system called Datatrieve. If you entered a command of WOMBAT you got the story of wombats. Why? As it turned out, wombats were the official mascot of Datatrieve. Why? Why not.

I used to use a text editor called TECO (also by Digital Equipment Corporation). This was a very different experience from today's editing bloatware like Word. You see, TECO is line based and has obscure single character commands. To create a new file, you entered "make" and the file name. By mistake I discovered if you typed "make love" TECO responded with "not war?". Conversely, if you typed "make war" you got "not love?".

At the time we didn't think much of these, just small jokes inserted by bored programmers and designers. At every computer show, though, my friends and I would gather around discussing business. And inevitably the conversation would turn to these little jokes. What new ones were found? Did anyone know of some new sequence to type to get some cute sequence or remark.

Years later these little gems became called Easter Eggs, probably because they are like useless hidden glittery things. Over the years thousands (or more) have been created, some easy to find and some requiring incredibly complex keyboard sequences to be revealed. All are silly and useless; I have no idea why they are popular and why they produce such excitement in people.

For example, Windows NT screen savers you can find three different screen savers. Open the Display control panel and click the screen saver tab. Select 3D Text(Open GL) from the screen savers drop down list. Then click the settings... button and enter the name of the Easter eggs below.

• Volcano - displays the names of all of the volcanoes in the west coast ring of fire.
• I Love NT - displays "good" with question mark around the screen.
• Not Evil - Anagram for "I Love NT". Displays full listing of NT developers.