Easter Eggs for windows

Easter Eggs for windows

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword. The term was coined by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure. It draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many Western nations as well as the last Russian imperial family's tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Carl Fabergé which contained hidden surprises.

Computer-related Easter eggs

Software-based

Easter eggs are messages, videos, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior that sometimes occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. 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) images of the entire development team. Easter eggs in the 1997 version of Microsoft Office include a hidden flight simulator in Microsoft Excel and a pinball game in Microsoft Word^.

Non-software

While computer-related Easter eggs are often found in software, occasionally they exist in hardware or firmware of certain devices. On some home computers, the BIOS ROM contains Easter eggs. Notable examples include several early Apple Macintosh models which had pictures of the development team in the ROM (accessible by pressing the programmer's switch and jumping to a specific memory address, or other equally obscure means), and some errant 1993 AMI BIOS that on 13 November proceeded to play "Happy Birthday" via the PC speaker over and over again instead of booting. Similarly, the Radio Shack Color Computer 3's ROM contained code which would display the likenesses of three Microware developers on a Ctrl+Alt+Reset keypress sequence—a hard reset which would discard any information currently in the dynamic memory.

 Easter eggs on DVDs

Easter eggs are also found on movie DVDs. In some cases, an extra click to the right or left, or going up in the menu instead of going down to select a choice will bring up a hidden feature (usually a random object on screen will be highlighted for selection), including concept art, humorous outtakes, or deleted scenes.