New Windows Easter Egg Discovered - And I'm in it!
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- Опубликовано: 27 мар 2021
- More than 25 years later, two new Easter eggs have been discovered, and I'm at the top of the list (the order is random, to be sure). See them both and hear Dave's analysis and insider history of the NT 4 SUR easter egg!
Dave also tells the story of the worst email he ever sent - or at least the worst Easter Egg related mail!
The first, in MSMail was documented by Lawrence Abrams of BleepingComputer.com based on a Twitter post by user Albacore:
Dave's Garage Mug:
tinyurl.com/ajxrt7fr
www.bleepingcomputer.com/news...
Check out Albacore's Twitter account with more Windows Beta trivia and history here: / thebookisclosed
Excel video from FlyVideo - check out his excellent info on Windows Betas at his channel!
/ theld3h
"I'm not a fan of hidden payloads."
Pity he doesn't work for Microsoft today.
Yeah. I have a really hard time reconciling that justification for not having Easter Eggs.
The vast vast vast majority of what's in the binary blobs that get copied to our disks could be considered hidden payloads. Even if you want to refine the definition down to "stuff it does that I didn't know it would do" there are STILL massive amounts of code doing background tasks, DRM checks, and all sorts of other things.
That has been true, to some extent, back into DOS (is that _MS_ DOS or _DR_ DOS?) and the code has only become increasingly opaque since then.
Of course somebody's going to complain that this "useless feature" just consumes space. They're going to complain that the text isn't hot pink, as well. You aren't going to please everybody.
But does everyone feel that way? No. Most people? Highly doubt it. Even a significant fraction of the users? Probably not. At worst, I would expect "Most People" to think, oh gee... something I don't care about that shows the developers have personality... so anyway... At best, you have people exploring and finding these things, documenting them, and sharing them with other users who get a kick out of it. WHERE'S THE HARM?
I mean seriously... show me ten people on planet Earth that are actually upset that you can play a platform game with the dinosaur in Google Chrome when the Internet goes down. Ten people. Go. Now find ten people who are delighted by it, if they didn't know it existed, and you show it to them.
People don't mind frivolity. They mind invasions on their rights and privacy. And WHICH ONE is more prevalent? Good lord.. take your Windows Activation and I'll trade you for a dumb dungeon crawler with silly music and credits scrolling on the walls ANY day.
@@nickwallette6201 Yeah I know that Dave was talking about Easter Eggs in software back in the days where space was limited and most software had to be able to fit on a CD, but nowadays we live in an age where people don't seem to blink or question installing software that is multiple gigabytes in size when the core program doesn't do anything that it couldn't some 20 years ago. So certainly today, there's no logic or practical reason to dismiss Easter Eggs for taking up maybe only a few megabytes of space.
@@nickwallette6201 Speak for yourself, I mind both and just because there's already "hidden payloads" doesn't mean I want more added in. If someone coughs on you you don't think to yourself "Well they already coughed on me once, who cares if they keep doing it?"
@@ebarobyre2720 That's a pretty strained analogy. But, OK, regarding the topic at hand -- what difference does it make to you if there's a routine that prints a silly message, and can only be triggered by some arbitrary command or key combo? Seriously, what difference does that actually make in your life? It's no more wasteful than _actual_ credits or About dialog strings - and even in the days of 360K floppy disks, is an inconsequential use of space. It doesn't do any harm. So, honest question: Why do you care?
@@FlyboyHelosim Not to mention at least if I remember right, I read/heard somewhere (and tbf I don't remember where exactly, so take it with a grain of salt) that Easter eggs started originally back in the days, because developers were not allowed to put their name in the software they created by the higher ups, however stupid that may sound today, so they ended up making a hidden credit screen that was never shown to said higher ups, to get their name in the works they had created
"nuclear reactor" haha, i had a laugh thinking about that. A critical terminal is being operated in a panic during a meltdown when a naive easter egg appears on screen triggered by pressing space three times. The screen reads "Dave rules and is awesome" locked while playing a laborious mono tone tune to completion.
Dude, write a story and submit it to a scifi journal or something. Seriously 😂
I use an application called Scrivener which is a sort of Integrated Development Environment for writing, and after an upgrade, found it completely unusable because all the menu text and labels had been changed to scifi terms meant to be someone's idea of funny. It was an Easter egg, put in by some developer and long forgotten, and inadvertently triggered by the upgrade. FRUSTRATING, it was. I like a laugh as much as the next guy, but I hate that hacker crap.
you joke about this, but I work on nuclear-related software and had proposed an easter egg a few years ago to remember an important colleague that had recently passed away. Since we are audited by NUPIC, the idea was immediately shutdown since it had the risk of adding potential bugs to a critical system. rip Vincent
Kernobyl
I love the easter egg that pops up when you press shift 5 times in a row or hold it in for 8 seconds.
So funny that you worked on the OLE team at that time. I was working for a Market Research company and we were trying to use OLE with the 16/32-bit thunking layer and it constantly crashed on us. So much so that we added an Easter Egg to our About dialog that popped up a "Crash Preferences" dialog box. It had a list of radio buttons: Crash app, Crash all apps, Crash Network, Crash Now ... and finally "Don't crash" which was grayed out.
I'm good friends with the guy who wrote the COM thunking layer! I'm sure he'd love and good thunking stories like that :-)
We still use Windows 3.1 at work, to run our analytical instruments.
Oof
Nothing wrong with that if it works and there is no need to change functionality.
I still run Windows 3.1 on one of my Porsche scan tools. And Windows 98 on one of my other scan tools. When you work on old cars you need old tools.
@@johnnyjoseph1389 There is a possible means of making those apps work on a newer os. But sometimes it isn't worth bothering. An old 3.1 app shouldn't have an issue with other 9x os's but sometimes UI elements and other graphical things can be a stopper. That and 3.1 has fewer moving parts to go wrong if its just a single purpose device.
@@wishusknight3009 Years ago I tried updating it to Windows 95 but failed miserably. In the reading I've done it has something to do with direct hardware access to the ISA card that the tool uses to communicate with the car... Fortunately it's not something I use everyday and it's kind of neat having old hardware anyway.
Great video. Would love to hear about the “Comfy chair.”
Yes, please! :D
I really like the "free stream of thought" style of this video. Sounds more friendly and personal.
Thanks, me too! Just much harder to cover as much info, but I'll try to incorporate more of that style...
As an end user I love easter eggs in software. When you see a hidden screen with photos and names you realize there where real people working on it, who cared and are proud
of the work they did. It makes it just a little more personal and maybe it made some people even feel bad about pirating the software.
I doubt that last part lol
Honestly I have to side with Dave on this one, it's comforting to know there isn't hidden undocumented code in software I'm using, even if the code is harmless
@@ebarobyre2720 There's always hidden, undocumented code in closed-source software.
It would be interesting to know how many non-game pieces of software that Microsoft has released where the credits were openly accessible in the documentation. Putting in hidden credits into software because the company officially won't goes at least as far back as the early Atari games, where the coders had to find ways to try and gain public recognition for their work while the company above actively denied them the ability to do so officially.
Yep. The first Easter Egg was literally a man taking credit for himself.
The closest thing I ever did to an Easter egg:
The internal software the corporation runs on was being modernized by throwing a Windows GUI over its mainframe base. When I got there it was total shit. I threw out 90% of the work because it was just a waste of code, and took what the mainframe gave me and threw it on the screen, then took what the user was trying to do and threw it back to the mainframe. Super simple. Followed the KISS principal and it went from unusable to far far ahead of schedule.
So I was stuck twiddling my thumbs... And had discovered how to animate stuff without flicker in windows. This is back when DirectX was new and it actually was not that easy to move objects around in Windows natively with no extra code without flicker. Dave knows a bit about this from working on task manager.
Anyway as more of a programming exercise than anything else, I took the logo which was round like a ball and made it so if you double clicked it on the help/about screen... It bounced in around the frame it was in. It was one of those typical ones where the logos on one side and then all of the information is in a big text box on the other half of that window. So you had half of a window for it to bounce around in.
Well simple bouncing physics are just changing direction when you hit a wall, no acceleration or deceleration or any of the interesting math... So I made it to have a paddle at the bottom so you could smack the logo and have it bounce around.
That's it. No score, no point, but it was just a little bit of code that I worked on because I was curious on how it would work and I really needed to kill some company time because I did too good of a job and did not want to get fired for not working on something even though they had no idea what I'd be working on. This isn't a software company, this is a company that's using the software.
So I guess I made an Easter egg, but it isn't The operating system. It's not critical. And I kind of think it was no big deal.
Easter eggs usually aren't a big deal. I think Dave is making too big of a deal out of it here
I think that as long as the easter egg has no chance to actually ruin anybody's day, then it's all good.
If it is caused by, for example, typing the command "dor" (a mispelling of dir), then , 1: it will be discovered too fast, and 2: if someone is using the dir command to quickly get vital information they just have to have right then, they'll be rather unhappy to find this easter egg.
I typed "sl" instead of "ls" in Ubuntu. Got greeted by an ASCII steam locomotive. I was like "the hell is happening?!" for a hot second there.
@@ujiltromm7358 sl is a standalone package, so you can uninstall it if you don't like it. Not true with most easter eggs.
Huh, cool!
I don't think easter eggs are a matter of Ego in the negative sense. I think it showcases the humanity behind a lot of these monolithic and often outwardly sterile-looking creations. People getting hysterical about the Excel doom-clone using up memory when it's not even activated is just an early example of people that today might be out there burning down 5G cell towers or wearing spiritual stones to protect themselves from radiation because they don't know any better.
I appreciate people having fun with their projects. I agree, it adds a sense of humanness. As long as the easter eggs are not so easy to trigger as to cause an annoyance or introduce a vulnerability, I don't get the problem.
Totally agree. Lighten up, people. If you're accounting for every byte taken when installing an application like Office.. even in the Win 95 days.. you've got issues beyond storage quotas. These are often TINY, with the 3D environment being probably one of the largest I've seen. Probably still consumes less than 2MB of disk space in total.
WAIT, are you telling me that the Easter Bunny isn't real?
Do you want an Easter egg popping up over some piece of software that is keeping you on life support?
@@virtualpilgrim8645 No, but we're not talking about that level of software. Every line of mission critical software is basically scrutinized in the first place. I mean, if someone is using Microsoft Word of Excel to keep themselves alive, they have bigger problems on the horizon.
And that 'doom in excel' thing was nothing compared to the flight sim in the next version
Loved the Flight Simulator on Excel 97
The best Easter eggs are the subtle ones, like Gates' mugshot as the default profile picture in older version of Outlook or theme colors of Groove/MP similar to Zune's ones
It's fun how you don't say particularly much about the results of that "reply all", yet your expression and tone says quite a lot.
I imagine he got his wings clipped...
you only hit reply all to a huge group once.
@@ericmyrs right?! ...and *they* never let you forget it either! :P
@@ericmyrs I wish that were so...
Senior manager walks up to Dave and utters those dreadful words, ‘can we have a word in my office please, now!’
Even delayed recognition is fun. I got a patent during my time at Microsoft Research but I left and the department got reorged multiple times so I never got my patent plaque and nobody seemed to know what admin had taken over the old department's records so I ordered one myself for the closure.
LOL... well, for what it's worth... congrats!
Cardinal Fang, FETCH... THE COMFY CHAIR!
(Btw, nice video, and thanks for crediting me :D)
Any time! Saved me going through all the hoops on an old Excel install! You've got a LOT of cool info on old betas, etc!
Ah, I knew it had something to do with Monty Python :D
I really miss how fancy and amazing Windows 95 felt after coming from a Tandy 1000 with DOS 3.22 and Tandy Deskmate. Nothing before or since has ever felt like such a jump.
My first introduction to it was project Chicago... So you will go wow, this is amazing compared to what you've seen elsewhere.... Followed immediately by it crashing. Lol
I still miss the "recent files" feature in '95 that's been absent or harder to use in every release since.
@@CStuartHardwick The Jump Lists in Windows 7 were pretty similar. You can install Open Shell on Windows 10 which will give you whatever menu options you want.
I still remember disliking the new GUI of Windows 95 so much (having come from Windows 3.x), that for a brief while I would try (in vain) to restyle 95 to more closely resemble 3.x . Program Manager and File Manager were (at the time) still present in the release, albeit obselete. I soon gave up when I realised the new GUI layout was actually fine.
25 years later, I'm again trying in vain to hang onto what's left of a legacy component of Windows i.e. Control Panel
@@TravisFabel My first introduction was the Windows 95 demo which (if I remember correctly) came packed which a special edition of a pack of Verbatim 3.5" floppy disks.
The demo itself (Essentially just an interactive slideshow in the guise of the 95 GUI) fit on the one disk.
And people thought Google was the first cool tech company. Microsoft was cool, back in the day. And now Google isn't cool either. So it goes.
I keep telling my colleagues: We are writing the legacy cruft of tomorrow - today. And that tomorrow, when today's "Rockstar code" becomes unreadable junk in need of replacement might not even be all that far off.
Apple was cool before either of them.
Yeah it was so cool to invest hours in avoiding Internet Explorer bugs because MS devs spent all their time on implementing unfunny easter eggs. But at least they have realized now that they can’t do software and should just use Google Chrome and Android.
@BathRo
IBM made a point of never being cool. If you were cool, the IBM interview process weeded you out.
After watching a bunch of your videos, I decided to learn C++. Thank you !
good luck! ive been teaching myself c++ for a month now, its a really interesting language!
C++ is heavily bloated, try C
@@invalid5777 C is bloated, try Machine Language
@@alonsomallea9840 Machine Language is bloated. Try soldering transistors.
@@invalid5777 Wrong C is bloated, try Lisp instead.
"I'm not a fan of hidden payloads" - I literally just watched your Microsoft BOB episode where you shipped half a billion copies of BOB with XP... lmao :) Keep up the great work, love the videos!
I fail to see the irony ;-)
I think Easter eggs have their place although yes they can go to far. A random teapot in the pipe screen saver I don't think so that's a fun little almost glitch ( hey there's a weird bug in the pipe saver and we're documenting that we don't know why we get a random tea pot every so often we can't figure it out). There are sometimes when you have to hide something to get the credits in otherwise they should be in there but that's generally just a bad work place if you're not allowed to / not getting credit. And there's been many a case of hidden code being useful for provability.
Ugh! That bloody pipe screensaver should never have been allowed anywhere near a server OS.
User: "Why does our database randomly become really slow to respond?"
Me: (After way too many hours of diagnosis) "Because some idiot (i.e. you) installed the pipes screensaver (which hammers the CPU) despite the server living in the datacentre where nobody will ever see it.". Doh!
@@davidfinch7418 is it the idiot user or the IT staff that installed a server with a video out? The best way to keep users from doing stuff like that on servers is to buy proper servers that are set up over network and don’t even know what a mouse is.
I noticed you were not working off a script about 25% through the video. You do well in both formats. I like the variety. Great topic too.
Sounds like when you sent that reply all to the massive alias, you may have been code complete, but you were probably in need of a few service packs, which it sounds like you managed to obtain over the years.
I've taken a few Windows Updates since then.
@@DavesGarage Can't choose when they start or stop either so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Early '97, our IT guy called and offered me NT4.0 to test. I was running some higher end CAD ware (higher end at the time). Became an instant celebrity on the engineering deck as everyone wanted to see NT. They were so pissed when they got Win98SE instead of NT at the next upgrade cycle... and I kept my NT4.0. 😎
The "upgrade to windows 10" adverts were malicious. No way to remove them. Even if you registry hack, delete it from system32, etc. Uninstall the update. It always came back and always re-downloaded W10 into C:/"Some-rando-key-name."
The very definition of a stable computer system is one that won't change on its own. Windows 8(.1) was actively trying to replace itself with another version, even without user intervention. So that meant that it was unstable... by design. :(
That's why I switched to Linux! Actually treats you like an adult!
@@8x13b Linux great. but many games and audio dev software dont work on it. So Im stuck using both
@@MegaMech Wine, VM, dual boot. Or switch to foss variants.
@Ruben duh! Thanks cpn obvious.
The most cringe-inducing Easter egg of all time was the zzzzzz egg in Word 97
@@sedme0 ever seen clippy sleeping
In older versions of Framemaker (at least 5-7) if you spell checked WordPerfect it suggested notepad as a replacement (actual easter egg) - it did that with a lot of competitor products.
lol Dave....you forgot your mug link!!! Awesome video, I LOVE these stories. As someone that grew up with 3.1, I was the kid learning computers and dreaming of working at MS while I learned the you and the team were making. I didn't join till 98se, so I missed a lot of this era. It's really cool to hear the behind the scenes.
With the edits I can sense there was so much awkwardness removed from the 'reply to all' email story. Thank you for sparing us!
I would have liked to hear more on the repercussions of that email, if any. In any case, another great story!
Greetings from just a bit north in Arlington, Dave. Great video as always!
Your email seems pretty tame to me. I've trumped your far worse regretably. I think those I sent it to were socially graced enough to realize I was just a young man and so didn't let it bother them.
I'm enjoying your channel. Thanks for creating these videos.
nice video dave :), loved the divide by zero story, also.. being the guy who created Zip folders and Task manager damn that is pure genius, Task manager believe it or not has saved my systems quite alot over the years, Microsoft should Give you a phat reward for those, if it wasn't for those two innovative ideas, I think windows would have struggled more in the mainstream desktop sector, gl dude keep up the great vids xD.
Awesome video. I loved it, along with all the videos you make. Keep it going! I don't want your videos to ever stop.
Thank you for sharing and i remain in awe of all you present.
I remember the clouds Easter egg from years ago. Long winded to trigger IIRC.
I think it was found quite quickly and one of the PC magazines covered it in detail at the time.
I put a semi hidden BOFH excuse generator in a simple help desk logging system I wrote ~20 years ago.
(Internal system used by me and the team)
It got old very quickly...
Thanks for the video, it is great to get your perspective on these sort of things.
This got suggested to me today as I was passively watching youtube while working on coding an easteregg INTO something for work (at request of boss). I had to stop and think about what you said, and will pass this video along before we do any more in the future.
I kinda love these extemporaneous videos Dave! And yes, tell us all about the comfy chair!!
A friend of mine in the ship engineering industry told me there are custom versions of Windows made for the UK Royal Navy submarines named colloquially, "Windows for Warships". (Wikipedia has more info!) You can understand not wanting Easter Eggs in that!
It's true! I think it's based on one of the older versions of Windows NT
Does your NDA expire? Or is it worded in a way that it never expires? Now I am curious
Well, it's not exactly ethical to leak confidential information even if you no longer work for the company and your NDA has expired.
Not in spirit!
@@a4andrei LOL as if you can be unethical towards an unethical entity like Microsoft
@@a4andrei Actually it's extremally ethical. I would almost consider it your duty and would consider anyone that didn't to be immoral.
For instance that twitch leaker is a living saint!
Hey mate, just want to let you know your videos are awesome. Really enjoying your content and love the relaxed format. Would love to see some more source code videos like Task Manager!
Excited to listen what you have to say about! Tks!
I remember seeing that second egg back in the 90's. Unless another egg used the same clouds interface with the names floating by? Wherever it was I know I haven't seen it in 20+ years. Thanks!
Edit: just watched a video of it with the MIDI music too. Wow, I'm instantly 25 again.
My fav channel👏👏👏. Dave it would be nice some videos about win architecture, developing drivers and others. Congrats
I put an Easter egg in a early 2000s Ericsson cell phone. I collected 200 some names of people who worked on the phone and pasted that list into MS Paint using a tiny font size (5). The bitmap width was the same as the phone display width and the height was long enough to fit all the names. Upon a certain key sequence, we displayed the bitmap, which can be scrolled. This was back in the monochrome display era. The phone was the Ericsson R280 and the key sequence was menu 0 menu 0 menu 0. 5 point font was the smallest size that you could actually make out the letters.
Thanks for your great expertise that you share with us! Keep it up! 👍
It's an honor to actually see a real windows dev
I have alot of respect for you man honestly a real life genius
I watch your videos religiously
Recently got laid of work very stressful time but watching you really is better then my anti depressants
I used to love finding the Adobe (& Quark before that faded into obscurity) Easter Eggs with each release - trying to find that one spot on the splash screen whilst holding down combinations of Option, Command (yes I was a Mac nerd from the early days) Control & Shift & Caps Lock. Hours of fun & that internal secret great sense of achievement for cracking the code.
Ill be looking forward to that drag race video, all of the content on this channel is so interesting
As a QA'er, I'm also not a fan of Easter Eggs. It's one more thing to test.
I stumbled on the one in our product that the engineer put in without telling anyone. It scrolled names and played a massive WAV file -- in a downloadable product when dial-up was still prevalent (the Easter Egg was far bigger than the product itself). It was also copyrighted music. And this was a CTO/Ops focused no nonsense product, so Easter Eggs kinda don't belong, especially with the huge WAV file visible in the file system.
I forget how this was handled. I think they overruled me but did supply a smaller file for the music.
@8:07 It did not take much torture testing to encounter that defect! haha... good job QA testing that.
Loved that video - and the world needs to hear about the comfy chair!
Very informative Dave thank you very much for this video
Great video as always!
Glad you enjoyed!
I appreciate software easter eggs that put a human face to corporate products by giving credit to the people who worked on them. It makes them feel more warm and personal. That being said, I can't stand Easter eggs that are just cringe-worthy phrases. I was once asked to incorporate one on a product, me and the other guy working on it thought it was just embarrassing, so we said "yes" and never did it. In typical corporate fashion, our group went through a reshuffling and no one ever followed up on it. It was great :)
Personally I really enjoyed hearing about, and then initiating, the flight simulator easter egg in Excel back in the day.
couldn't disagree more with regards to easter eggs. They show the human side to the people and company instead of it being just dry, professional blandness. It gives abit of fun and enjoyment for people who like to find or experience them as well. All the downsides you listed are either easily resolved through not just allowing a wild west approach and ensuring they are suitable and reasonable and far less an issue than other common windows practices of the past (inserting fake error messages to scare users from using Dr Dos) and especially today (forcing analytics and spying on the user without an opt out just at best the option to "only send basic information"). I find Windows 10s policies on forcing updates against my will in the background despite repeated attempts to stop it far more concerning.
I remember when I heard about this easter egg being found, the first thing I did was look for your name. Not shocked you were in it at all!
Microsoft programmer: "people don't like hidden payloads"
NOWAY!! REALLY?!
Current management has different views about that lol
That was a cringe indeed.. M$ and hidden payloads.. 🙄
This being the one example of hidden payloads that people actually _do_ find amusing.
I always loved Easter Eggs. Great video
One of First MS Easter eggs I seen was the purple 3D mountains fly by to the shrine of names, seen ‘volcano’ in NT screensaver, and the arcade like thing on a newer mso, was like spy hunter.
Windows 311 was one of my favourite versions.
I like your videos a lot Dave. Keep it up! Don't burn yourself out though. I would hate to miss you for a while.
Good point, thanks!
Have you read the book “Showstopper”, which chronicled the development of NT 3.51?
I have and it's a VERY good book, and very accurate and authentic. One of the only books about the company that I think I can say that about! Recommended.
I remember the Easter Egg in Windows 98 screensaver, when you had entered the word "volcano", names of actual volcanos appeared on the screen!
Interesting take on Easter eggs. I always liked em but you make sense.
That's awesome :D
Hey Siam Alam I watched you years ago
3
Thanks for this interesting video. I hope uou make more!
Thanks for 60 fps video. Even if it's "only" a face cam, video is so much smoother!
I know, right? Most are at 24fps. Some are at 30fps. My head's not moving that much, so I figure 60fps should compress well enough!
That product placement was smooth :)
Add multithreading to dragrace, allow cpu;s to utilize them fully.
"Perhaps working with some deficits on the ol' social spectrum." That's perhaps one of the funniest lines I've ever heard :)
I remember hearing about them way back when the SUR was released ... i am reasonably sure it was in the public back in 98SE Win2k days . I know I've seen some of these running at Stores where someone or another started it on the store display models
Hi there! Greetings from Romania. I was a Microsoft fan back in the days. I really enjoyed Microsoft as a company and model in the Bill Gates era. Don't know it was another philosophy even with the UI, the brand names and so. Now, I cannot say the same. I work on MS-DOS because we need at Turbo Pascal / C, later Boralnd Pascal and Borland C++. Then I enjoyed Windows 3.1, WIndows 95 :). My 1st computer was a Z80 spectrum clone... well PC were expensive and I remember my 1st one was a Pentrium with MMX technology build for the Windows 95 era but at that moment Windows 98 was on the horinzont so I had Windows 95 for a few days and then decided to run Windows 98 Beta2, then the RC builds which I got from some guys. I loved the titlebar gradient. Oh, great memories! I remember that cartoon-based chat that was available in Windows 98... ah and the built-in MP3 codec that I need to install by adding support for NetMeeting... Oh God! :) Despite many people hate Windows Me, I liked it because of its Windows 2000 UI look and less demanding hardware resources. I remember the 9x handled well some old tv-tuner cards... overlay support was better. :)
Ok now I’m super stoked for the next drag race.
You give me hope
Thx Dave. i actually did not know about this one until i saw this on your video... i knew one for the screen saver but not this one. Nice 🙂
This easter egg existed in both 95 and NT 4... and I remember running both of them "back in the day" -- the instructions for the Windows 95 easter egg were widely known and publicized, and the NT 4 version wasn't much different nor hard to figure out.
It was also possible to do some digging through regedit and come across the magic UUID names that would allow you to bypass the intended steps, just name the folder with the UUID name from the get-go, and off you are.
I’ll be sure to fire up good old NT4 after the premiere to try this out.
I think it was Word 97 that had a copy of Flight Simulator as an Easter Egg. Had many hours of fun with that.
Love the SpaceX hat.
LOVE YOUR SPACEX CAP!!!
Sorry had to shout it.
“Not a fan of hidden payloads” omg I love you.
That precious 0.02 seconds that it takes to load that additional 4kB of the EXE file
@@RadioactiveBlueberry That's not the point. It's not resource usage, it's a matter of a commercial closed source program always behaving predictable and professional.
Yeah pity he doesn't still work for Microsoft. Windows 10 is one huge hidden payload.
That's probably why he got "retired."
@@roelbrook7559 What commercial program _ever_ has a guarantee for being predictable and professional? It's code. It has bugs. It will not be expected, else it wouldn't still be a bug.
I fail to see how some branch of code that only gets triggered on the rarest of corner cases is a liability, when things you do in the normal course of using the software can and will crash the application or cause unexpected results.
We're talking about a company that wrote a chaos generator triggered by specially crafted markup language, and shipped it under the name Trident. The Easter Eggs were the _least_ of your worries...
I remember being told about the MS Visual Basic 6.0 "Show VB Credits" Easter Egg back in high school
little Pi gonna beat 'em all!
(It only depends on how much of them you have)
Regarding hiding credits, what about early Atari where a few programmers hid their initials or names in games because Atari told them programmers didn’t matter and they were no more important to the product than the person on the assembly line that snapped the cart together?
As a developer, I can't agree more with Dave about Easter eggs.
The least thing I need is to lose the trust of a customer (user) for my code. Especially if it's a closed source.
Programmers are equal with MDs in a moral sense. A software can bring a mortal damage too, nowadays. And often a lot more then a single rogue medical doctor.
Best '90s Easter egg I remember: the Photoshop 4.0 Big Electric Cat(MacOS version, I don't know if the Windows version had it), a cartoony, psychedelic feline in the About credits screen. Clicking its nose made its mouth open and a particularly rude, deep belch come out of your computer's speakers. Especially fun if you had a really powerful set of speakers hooked up to your computer;-).
Thanks Dave
It remind me my windows 95 days.
I have a funy story. I bought a PC and very first day Friend of mine told me to partition my HDD as it was huge those days(2G). I knew nothing much and I low level format the HDD. System only booted up Up to floppy dist and it didn't recognize windows 95 CD. Long story short I got MSCDEX(if I spell it correctly) file from London Drugs store here in Surrey BC. Once I booted and executed Setup from CD, Was my happiest moment.
Thanks for your fascinating stories. Please keep it up.
Keep it up, nice video clip, thank you for sharing it :)
I remember an Easter egg in Windows 3.1 that was accessed by doing something on the Help\About screen. A bunch of cascading cards like when you beat Solitaire would appear on screen and I think credits for the Windows Development Team would also appear on screen.
"I'm not a fan of easter-eggs."
Hides MS Bob in nearly every Windows installation Disc
For a technical, security purpose, not for vanity. That'd be the difference.
@@DavesGarage True that, but I still giggled a little bit, as you said that. By the way, I really like your videos. They are really interesting to watch and give a really good behind the scenes insight.
How do you used to manage your source control back to the days of win 95 development
I think Git was not yet developed back then?
I worked on OS/2 at IBM in the mid 1990s and we had full Windows 3.1.1 source code. I'm pretty sure there was an egg in win 3.1 too. For those who don't know, early OS/2 and Windows were essentially identical. They even had the exact same desktop icons. But Uncle Bill had bigger ideas and split up with IBM to do Win 95. OS/2 Warp was IBM's desperate attempt to try to capture some market share before the impending domination of Windows.
As much as I like hídden easter eggs in anything, be it normal software or OS, I agree with your view on it. However I love them in games :D Feel like in games they're perfect fit.
That's hilarious! I used to put eggs in all my stuff, long story. I used to do the same thing as you as a kid, the phone rang and I'd pick it up, "Is your Dad there?" "Yes" I'd reply, then hang up.
Thanks for sharing. 😎👌🏼
Could you tell us about what programming was like back then?The tools you used, how testing and debugging was done...
I can tell you about the Windows 3.1 era. All of the source code was either assembler (maybe 30%) or C. You ran two different PCs - one ran the Windows code and the other ran Kernel Debugger, which was a command line interface that let you stop execution, set breakpoints, and examine cpu registers and memory. The PCs were connected over a serial cable (rs 232). The entire source code, including calculator, paint, etc. Was about 40 MB. I thought about 'borrowing" a copy but didn't want to feed 40 1.44 MB floppies. Compiling and linking was done using masm and the MS C toolset (all CLI, no visual studio yet). You kick off a build, cross your fingers, and go get some free coffee.
Have you done a video explaining the differences or history of the different versions of windows? I see you have mentioned before that some versions were 16 bit and what not, but I don' really know the history between the versions and bases for each.
At least one version of Excel had a rudimentary flight simulator in it.
I wrote a frontend (GUI) for restaurant/bar table service. I skinned all the buttons to look like colourful clear jelly candies. One night, after a bit of drinking, sillyness got the best of me. Short story. I created an animation to squish buttons, and let their liquid filling drip down the screen. I made it trigger by counting too many (20+) presses of any same button. As these were ēlo touchscreen systems, that made it all more funny. FYI: No real candies were harmed in the making of Easter Egg.
IIRC they actually do promise no Easter eggs these days for government/DOD contract reasons.
Also I’m all in for any WinNT videos, I was always a fan of NT.