[HN Gopher] Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an E...
___________________________________________________________________
Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in
Windows 1.0
Author : rbanffy
Score : 274 points
Date : 2022-03-23 11:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techradar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techradar.com)
| echelon wrote:
| > Perhaps the most notable name in the newly unveiled list is
| Gabe Newell, now president at Valve - known for everything from
| Half-Life to the Steam Deck. Newell worked at Microsoft from 1983
| to 1996, leaving to found Valve.
|
| That's new information for me! I had no idea Gabe worked for
| Microsoft. Another billionaire founder/CEO to add to my list of
| "first worked at FAANG/MANGA" (though this one does looks back
| pretty far back).
|
| The FAANG/MANGA -> Startup pipeline is a good one. Learn all the
| technical skills and the lay of the land in a great environment,
| build strong connections, save up some cash, then leverage them
| to succeed in your own interests.
| toyg wrote:
| Did you read _Microserfs_ and _JPod_ , by Douglas Coupland? The
| reality of '80s/'90s Microsoft was a bit different from modern
| FAANG.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The cash is an important part. Valve isn't public and can do
| what it wants!
| bushbaba wrote:
| It can also be happy with its existing marketshare. When a
| public company the motto is grow or die.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's quite impressive they managed to make a profitable
| business given that when they started, video game piracy was
| such a big thing (at least in my recollection); Valve / Steam
| did for PC video game piracy what Spotify did for music
| piracy and streaming services did for movie / TV show piracy.
| gigaflop wrote:
| Piracy can often be discouraged by making the legitimate
| options more accessible. Steam served as a unified
| storefront for multiple titles, and made it easy to manage
| a library of content without flipping through a binder of
| CDs, a notebook page full of CD keys, and a box full of the
| manuals they came with.
|
| Why worry about downloading multiple chunks of an archive
| and reassembling them, or having your ISP throttle you for
| torrenting, or trusting the crackers of the content you're
| pirating when you can just wait for the game to go on sale?
|
| I'll say, though. Elden Ring didn't work for me at launch,
| and I ended up refunding it(thanks, digital refund
| process!), but I seriously considered getting a pirated
| copy to see if the cracked version would work better.
| Anecdotal reports suggested that the anticheat (which was
| cracked in the pirated version) was the cause of issues for
| plenty of people.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Valve has a netflix-like model early on. I remember that
| you'd buy boxed Valve software and it would come several
| license keys, one for the base game, then another for the
| expansion, etc. You could give these keys away to friends
| to play online with. Free CD keys from my friend's dad was
| what allowed me to get into PC gaming.
| gigaflop wrote:
| How early was this? My intro to Steam was via the Orange
| Box, which I bought from a physical store. I don't
| remember if Steam was mandatory for them.
|
| Either way, CD keys used to be totally shareable, before
| online DRM really kicked off. You could just copy the one
| you got, and let someone else use it to install the game.
|
| A downside I faced was when my CD for a game stopped
| working, and I had to buy the game all over again to get
| a new CD + key. Either key would work during the install,
| but I didn't have the option of just downloading the
| installation media, so I had to pay up.
|
| The other time I saw this backfire was in a (temporary)
| LAN setting with COD4:MW. There were only so many CD
| keys, and you wouldn't be able to join a game where
| 'your' key was already active. Otherwise, it was fully-
| featured and fully usable!
| pvg wrote:
| Fairly sure Steam was mandatory for Orange Box and was
| also probably the first (or thereabouts) time Steam did
| the key sharing thing - getting the Orange Box bundle
| would give you extra keys for the bits you already owned.
| This model isn't really how the bulk of bundles sold on
| Steam work now, though, for whatever reason - bundles
| tend to just get steep discounts on sale with possible
| extra discounts for content you already have.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Your recollection matches mine. I recall much discussion of
| how PC gaming was dying and being replaced by consoles in
| large part due to piracy.
|
| Valve did it so much better than the streaming services
| though. There are remarkably few games I can't get from
| Steam, but I need half a dozen TV streaming services to get
| decent show coverage.
|
| Gabe took to heart what media companies refuse to believe:
| that piracy is a _service_ problem. Make the legitimate
| service better and more convenient than piracy and it
| practically goes away overnight.
| echelon wrote:
| > Valve did it so much better than the streaming services
| though. There are remarkably few games I can't get from
| Steam, but I need half a dozen TV streaming services to
| get decent show coverage.
|
| Valve has a lot of amazing things going for it: a major
| social component, game save backups, achievements, deep
| libraries of purchased content. These make the platform
| sticky in a marketplace with lots of alternatives. They
| are also smart enough to recognize Microsoft trying to
| choke them and they've made investments in platforms that
| will ensure their continued success: SteamOS, Steam
| Deck...
|
| Valve also caters to the developers: easy networking,
| easy distribution. Lots of code you don't have to write
| or support.
|
| While Netflix isn't suffering, they certainly wish they
| had these sorts of advantages going for them.
|
| Netflix didn't build a monopoly on the content and
| franchises that legacy media companies then used to
| bootstrap their own competing services. After this
| licensing weakness became obvious, other tech companies
| started to encroach on the market too.
|
| Netflix saw a way to survive the drying up of their
| licenses in making their own original content.
| Unfortunately, it's a slow and expensive process to
| produce media, with no guarantees of success for any
| given title. And it's not something that only Netflix can
| do, either. Anybody with money can produce content.
|
| Netflix should have offered the ability to buy titles
| early on and run deep discounts on what they saw were
| subscription drivers. It might have cannibalized their
| subscription revenue and resulted in some subscribers
| churning, but they wouldn't be churning to other
| services. You'd be surprised by the number of people that
| subscribe to Netflix and just want to watch The Office or
| Parks and Rec. They could have perpetually kept these
| folks on the platform.
|
| Netflix should have also built a ratings, review,
| library, and social component that kept viewers involved
| in the platform. Something not portable.
|
| Going forward, Netflix should build tools to let content
| producers run faster when making content for Netflix (run
| a lot of operations, provide ADs, personnel, studio
| space, etc.) The rest of the industry is consolidating,
| and they need to get in on this.
|
| Netflix also needs to get ahead of the game on new tech.
| Automated means to change product placements dynamically
| to earn even more revenue on long tail content
| (re)watching, etc.
|
| Ultimately, I think film and television media is going to
| be disrupted by new forms of content that are orders of
| magnitude faster to produce, orders of magnitude cheaper,
| and satisfies the entire long tail of interests. If a
| company can get in and build a marketplace that caters to
| both producers and consumers, and establishes a deep
| moat, it will be the Valve or YouTube of future long form
| content.
| gigaflop wrote:
| Steam has reaped the rewards of the first-mover
| advantage, but I feel like they deserves a bit of respect
| for it, since the problems they were solving were still
| 'new', and solutions allowed people to actually do new
| things/have a better experience, instead of sitting back
| and extracting rent. SteamOS is something I'm going to be
| incredibly thankful for in the future, since I plan to
| transition from Windows-first to Linux-first, and can now
| take more of my games along with me.
|
| I don't think Netflix would have had such an easy (as in
| straightforward or simple) time of things. Different
| audiences, different histories, different use cases and
| existing structure, etc. I like their product, but I
| don't know how much wiggle room they had when dealing
| with 'Big Film', who would have likely been heavy and in
| a deep trench.
|
| Steam was 100% digital from the start, and their
| customers were almost guaranteed to have an internet
| connection on their PC, which let them make assumptions
| about how to move forward. Their main competition was
| boxed software being sold in stores. Like you say, they
| added value in making it more attractive for _developers_
| to put themselves on the platform, while making it more
| attractive for a user to be there as well.
|
| Netflix was physical-first, and (imo) didn't really
| disrupt anything, but just made certain 'workflows'
| easier(Don't bother driving to the video store, but still
| pick out the movies, and just put them back in the mail)
| to achieve. It could have been implemented with a
| physical catalog and some postcards, if the web weren't
| as developed as it was.
|
| I don't have hard evidence, but I think that part of
| their model relied on _not_ selling, in order to keep
| licensing costs down. Since blank DVDs can be had cheap
| as dirt, why else would they charge a fee for unreturned
| discs? It 's a way for them to show that people aren't
| actually _buying_ something, which may mean that they don
| 't need to pay as much back to the content owners.
|
| > Netflix should build tools ...
|
| Film studios cater to those who are creating something to
| be sold in some form, and don't necessarily care about
| the consumer at the end(imo). They're B2B, where Steam is
| B2B + B2C. Netflix is mostly B2C, but may still have some
| innovation left if they take what they're learning with
| Originals to build a stronger/more valuable B2B.
| gigaflop wrote:
| I'm glad to see that Steam has more competition nowadays,
| but I'm just not a fan of the competitors. I feel like
| some of them have _reduced_ the value they provide to
| users by creating their own storefronts /launchers/etc.
|
| Fortunately for them, they only need to care about
| shareholder value. Users come second </s>
|
| I like GOG enough to willingly use their Galaxy client,
| since they tend to provide DRM-free options, and because
| buying CDPR games via GOG gives them a bigger share of
| revenue without costing me more money or dignity.
|
| Origin and Uplay seem to add no value for a user, and I
| remember a big fuss a while back about Origin scanning
| people's PCs a bit too eagerly. I think Ubisoft and EA
| also started withdrawing their newer titles from Steam
| and the likes to push people towards their own platforms,
| but that isn't consumer-friendly in the least bit.
|
| Epic seems to have had ups and downs with their
| store/services. I don't use it personally, but it was
| _not_ feature-complete at release[1], and they got a lot
| of titles on their service by making exclusivity deals,
| instead of by offering a better experience. Metro Exodus
| was a particularly stinky example of this, in that people
| preordered the game on Steam, only to have a timed
| exclusivity deal with Epic put into place shortly before
| release.
|
| If I were a games developer, I don't know if the better
| revenue share with Epic would be worth the potential lost
| sales from being available everywhere, even if it were
| only a timed exclusivity. I'm part of the camp that just
| doesn't want to use certain storefronts, so why wouldn't
| I expect the same from my customers?
|
| [1]: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing-
| the-epic-... (Because a Shopping Cart feature was
| apparently not necessary for their 1.0 release of a video
| game storefront)
| baud147258 wrote:
| > Origin and Uplay seem to add no value for a user, and I
| remember a big fuss a while back about Origin scanning
| people's PCs a bit too eagerly.
|
| I think the issue is when EA and Ubisoft bundles Uplay
| and Origin in the games distributed through Steam,
| forcing you to create a Uplay/origin account and install
| it. I understand why they're doing it (so that people
| install Uplay/origin), but I really dislike it. Also it
| recently prevented me from playing a Ubisoft title, as I
| couldn't get it to run with the last Uplay version.
|
| > I think Ubisoft and EA also started withdrawing their
| newer titles from Steam and the likes to push people
| towards their own platforms, but that isn't consumer-
| friendly in the least bit.
|
| For EA it worked so well they started putting back their
| games on Steam...
| gigaflop wrote:
| EA and Ubisoft can _try_ to have their cake and eat it
| too, but Steam has been better at showing what EULAs and
| online accounts are required before a consumer makes a
| purchase. The Steam Store page for Assasin 's Creed:
| Odyssey (the last Creed game I remember news of) tells us
| to expect Denuvo DRM (an anti-feature that some people
| boycott, chosen by Ubi), a 3rd-party account requirement,
| and whatever the game's actual EULA is.
|
| Nevermind the face that the game is MSRP on Steam, and
| Ubi had it marked down to $15 on their own platform when
| I checked. Gee, I wonder why the price hasn't been cut on
| Steam? </s>
|
| As for EA specifically, they've been a bit of a dumpster
| fire for PC gamers, and have pushed a lot of 'Games are a
| Live Service' stuff. They've released games that are
| partially broken on day 1, but have their
| microtransaction systems fleshed out. While purchasable
| on Steam, their latest Battlefield game still requires an
| EA account, to get people onto their Epic Store. It's
| just a way to advertise in front of the Steam crowd, to
| tease them towards their platform with some discounts.
|
| (very opinionated, if you haven't noticed)
| robotnikman wrote:
| >Fortunately for them, they only need to care about
| shareholder value. Users come second </s>
|
| I think the fact that Valve doesn't need to worry about
| being strangled by shareholders has been a major
| advantage for them, and has led to a higher quality
| service than the competition can provide
|
| Uplay and Origin look like the a cheap ploy to try and
| extract more money from users in comparison.
| gigaflop wrote:
| Fun fact, Tencent (Chinese conglomerate) owns about 40%
| of Epic. Ubisoft also tried adding blockchain tech/NFTs
| to their games to manage cosmetic items, which is stupid
| on multiple levels, IMO, especially since you can't
| actually transfer them outside of their closed ecosystem.
|
| Valve has the breathing room to do what they want. Their
| cash cow of Steam helps them out A LOT, since they don't
| even need to make games anymore. Instead, they've
| invested into what they think benefits the future of
| gaming. Who else in the games industry would make a non-
| locked-down VR headset, or work on anything Linux-
| related? Maybe indies, if they had the money.
|
| Valve will probably make HL3 at _some point_ , but last I
| heard, it was an idea waiting for the right tech. I'd
| rather it stay that way if it makes it better.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > The FAANG/MANGA -> Startup pipeline is a good one. Learn all
| the technical skills and the lay of the land in a great
| environment, build strong connections, save up some cash, then
| leverage them to succeed in your own interests.
|
| That's not exactly that story here though. He joined MS when it
| was more of a (late stage) startup, not a mega-conglomerate it
| is today. Also, he stayed there for a looong time - 13 years.
| Thirdly, seeing how he joined MS in 1983 and left in 1996, he
| almost certainly was already rich and set for life from the MS
| stock when founding Valve.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| The first name I recognized was Gabe Newell, of Valve fame.
| Wonder what he thinks about this. Someone in the Twitter thread
| already suggested shooting him an email, hopefully someone does
| so and shares his response.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| One can't help but notice him - it looks like, no matter which
| name is clicked, Gabe Newell is highlighted and the background
| changes to smile emojis!
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Half life 3 confirmed?
| ZYinMD wrote:
| The Windows UI in 1985 looked great.
|
| (So was the 1984 Macintosh)
| LocalH wrote:
| The trigger sequence was found. It's different between 1.xx and
| 1.01. From BetaWiki:
|
| > _The sequence for triggering the feature depends on the
| version:_
|
| > _1.xx: Press Alt+Shift+Esc+Enter_
|
| > _1.01 and later: Hold Alt and then Esc, release Alt and then
| Esc, press Esc twice and then press Backspace._
|
| 1.xx was a slightly prerelease version shipped with the Tulip
| System PC Compact. I don't know if anyone has looked in DR5, or
| the alpha or beta versions that have been preserved.
|
| There's a similar egg in 2.x. Also from BetaWiki:
|
| > _To trigger this easter egg, you must press F1, F5, F9, F4, and
| Backspace in quick succession._
| manbash wrote:
| A link with all the triggers to the respective versions was
| posted down the twitter thread:
| https://pastebin.com/raw/FruE3GRX
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Was the trigger sequence found by analyzing assembly, or did
| someone actually manage to trigger it in the wild?
| Darkphibre wrote:
| The first time I realized the danger of Easter eggs was one
| that was triggered by Alt+Ctrl+Shift+PERIOD or some such.
| Tested it out and sure enough it would paste an email exchange
| about needing to add an easter egg into a comment field.
|
| Then I was demoing the software to leadership in a surprise
| visit, and it triggered. Turns out, I'd ORed the keys together!
| I tried to Ctrl-A+DEL but... the email was longer than the
| comment field and triggered a state in which _any_ keypress was
| rejected with an alert, even one that would shorten the comment
| (bug #2). And I couldn 't leave the form, as the early
| prototype was designed to save-on-exit. So I had to kill the
| app... lesson learned.
|
| My last easter egg was simply the name of "Lightish Red" for
| one of the AI colors in Halo Infinite. Much safer (once it got
| through localization, hah).
| fein wrote:
| I wonder how many Halo infinite players will know the origins
| of lightish red going back to Halo CE, specifically the RvB
| web series. I've been out of the video game trend loop since
| Halo 2, and am not sure if the modern attention span of a few
| months at best enables 10+ year old easter eggs like that to
| be understood. I certainly appreciate it, but I also will
| probably never play Infinite.
| steve76 wrote:
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >(once it got through localization, hah).
|
| i can imagine that passed with flying colors
| esquivalience wrote:
| I believe that is a fair translation of the actual Chinese
| word for pink!
| Qub3d wrote:
| You are the dev that added Lightish Red?
|
| I want you to know that the reddit halo community loves you.
| fps_doug wrote:
| I found a VM titled "Windows 1.0 Premiere Edition", both
| sequences do nothing. I couldn't find any "About" window to
| tell me the exact Windows version, though.
| Maursault wrote:
| Uh... I am pretty sure that Windows _1.0_ was never released (or
| "launched"). Windows 1.01 was released in the US on November 20,
| 1985.
| ncmncm wrote:
| In other news, somebody outside Microsoft did, literally,
| anything with Windows 1.0.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| It makes me laugh now that Easter eggs were a thing. Can you
| imagine getting that past code review these days? And it makes
| you wonder, if those were the kind of things you could get
| included imagine how easy a inconspicuous privilege escalation
| bug would be to slip in.
| mrob wrote:
| I think Easter eggs should still be included, but they should
| be listed in the "Easter Eggs" section of the documentation.
| Most people won't bother reading the documentation so the
| effect will be close enough.
| bugmen0t wrote:
| Firefox has easter eggs AND visible credits. The former I won't
| tell. The latter is about:credits.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| It was a problem even at the time, as Easter eggs took up a
| fair amount of memory on microcomputers. The famous WAIT6502,10
| in Microsoft BASIC Easter egg would be removed by some vendors:
| https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20220128-microsoft-commodor...
|
| I'm not sure Microsoft did formal code review at the time, by
| the way. Windows was the first time its rather informal
| development practices became a liability.
| Mayzie wrote:
| Every Android version has a unique easter egg (repeatedly
| tapping something in the Developer menu). It is still very much
| a thing, but a lot rarer.
| jstanley wrote:
| I don't think a privilege escalation bug in Windows 1.0 would
| be of much value.
| ale42 wrote:
| Especially that there are no privileges to escalate...
| blenderdt wrote:
| Have you already found your shark in your Opel/Vauxhall
| interior?
|
| Easter eggs are still a thing, in software and even in
| production cars.
| eloisant wrote:
| Nah, Easter eggs can still totally be a thing. It's not
| necessarily something that a developer sneaks in alone, it can
| be something a whole team in agrees on.
|
| I guess they're less of a thing now because it's been done so
| much, and with Internet everyone is immediately aware of it,
| they're not as fun as in the past.
|
| Android for example had multiple easter eggs, when you go the
| phone information and tap multiple times on the version number
| you get an animation.
| yreg wrote:
| In /r/teslamotors users often complain that the company
| spends too much effort on easter eggs.
| lopis wrote:
| If anything, Easter eggs became as pervasive as April's
| fools jokes and turning your logo rainbow during June. 37
| years is a record, but an Easter egg shouldn't be something
| everyone knows and that is everywhere.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I'm sure that if the Tesla team could launch real full self
| driving instead of coding up the easter eggs, they would
| have done, but some people just don't understand that it's
| not the same amount of effort.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Can you imagine getting that past code review these days?_
|
| I can, yes. Easter eggs aren't some clever thing that a
| developer sneakily included. They're just features that aren't
| documented. They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like
| everything else.
| criddell wrote:
| I can't imagine the flight simulator in Excel went through
| planning and QA.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like everything else.
|
| And the product owner agrees spending half of the sprint
| points on Easter eggs. :)
| mcast wrote:
| I strongly recommend watching "Dave's Garage" on YouTube. He
| gives a pretty interesting insight in how code was built and
| easter eggs were added in his Windows NT days. He's also the
| same MSFT employee who created the task manager and ported the
| Pinball game onto Windows XP.
| notRobot wrote:
| They have some great Reddit threads:
|
| I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something... https
| ://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote...
|
| AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kfpjhg/i_am_dave_
| plum...
| phtrivier wrote:
| I wish "crediting the people who wrote the software you're using"
| was not something that had to be hidden behind easter eggs.
|
| As far as I know, the only kind of software that routinely does
| that is games ; and I suspect it is because games have an
| "ending", and the analogy works with plays and movies that have
| credits in the end.
|
| The software departments of any Marvel / Pixar flicks is probably
| bigger than most of the teams I worked with, and noone seems to
| be terrified to see their names printed after the generic bad guy
| with the blue skybeam is defeated...
|
| Open source projects have an AUTHORs.txt file ; would it really
| break the stability of the financial world if they had a
| `--credits` flag, too ?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| There are some reflections on that in view of the story of the
| original Macintosh on Folklore.org, in particular in "Credit
| where due"[1] (which seems to suggest this has been the
| original purpose of the About box--note GNOME still uses it
| that way) and "Signing party"[2] (which discusses the problem
| of drawing the line), see also "Steve icon"[3].
|
| [1]
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&/sto...
|
| [2]
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
|
| [3]
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
| sacrosancty wrote:
| But why? People who know those individuals can easily know what
| they did and they're just meaningless names to everyone else.
| Credits in movies are ridiculous. What even is a "best boy
| grip" and why does everyone need to know his name? With actors,
| it makes sense and the audience gets value from that. But do
| people have favorite best boy grips that put some special touch
| on the movie to make it better than all those others?
|
| Do you want names of engineers on physical products too? Brand
| names and compliance logos are bad enough.
| djkoolaide wrote:
| For those like me who were curious, from the Wikipedia
| article[1]:
|
| _According to the OED, "It has been suggested that it
| originated as a term for a master's most able apprentice, or
| alternatively that it was transferred from earlier use for a
| member of a ship's crew, but confirmatory evidence for either
| of these theories appears to be lacking." The earliest known
| appearance of the phrase in print is 1931 from the
| Albuquerque Journal: "Among the electricians ... the
| department head is the gaffer, his first assistant is the
| best boy."_
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_boy
| nattaylor wrote:
| Photoshop loading screen used to do it
|
| I haven't used PS recently to know it is still does
| maxsilver wrote:
| Photoshop 2022 still has a credit list on the splash screen.
|
| I don't know if that's _everyone_ at Adobe on Photoshop or
| not, but there 's 50-ish or more names on the splash screen
| at launch. - https://natashashaneek.com/adobe-photoshop-
| splash-screen-202...
| CharlesW wrote:
| It does, with the "most important" people shown by default.
| If you hold Option (on macOS) while choosing "About
| Photoshop...", you'll get a scrolling movie-credits-type list
| that appears to show everyone who worked on the release.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > As far as I know, the only kind of software that routinely
| does that is games
|
| This actually took some time to become the norm, with some
| really notorious incidents of companies that _refused_ to let
| developers be credited in game. The Castlevania games, for eg,
| had fake horror movie-ish names in their credits. The developer
| credit in Adventure was an easter egg as well. Even Nintendo
| games had credits that were often full of pseudonyms.
| [deleted]
| baud147258 wrote:
| Jira (at least the version deployed in my current workplace,
| v8.14.1) has a credits button in the header.
| phtrivier wrote:
| The hosted (*.atlassian.net) version does not seem to have
| it, though :/
| lopis wrote:
| I think it's because games are often closer to art, and in the
| art world, crediting the creators is common.
| jandrese wrote:
| The business of making movies means that people in the industry
| are constantly having to find new work. Having their name
| advertised is probably helpful in landing a job on the next
| film.
|
| Software development is supposed to be a more steady career, so
| the need to constantly advertise yourself isn't as pressing.
| That said if you want to move up and get bigger paychecks it
| definitely helps to get your name out there.
| 13of40 wrote:
| The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was
| that listing your developers like that was a good way to get
| them poached by other companies. Crediting people by name is
| always a bit of a minefield anyway. Do test engineers and SRE
| get included? Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his
| name come first or do you do it alphabetically? Etc.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| A similar policy with a similar motivation was allegedly a
| major factor in the commonly-cited "first easter egg" in
| _Adventure_ for the Atari 2600, as well as the founding of
| Activision.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago)
| was that listing your developers like that was a good way to
| get them poached by other companies.
|
| I have to doubt the argument here. I was there 20 years ago,
| and the companies that wanted to recruit would just get the
| listing of all CS students for that year from university
| notebooks, and called them in a row. Why didn't MS forbid
| employees from being in their phone books or university
| facebooks ?
|
| > Do test engineers and SRE get included?
|
| Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get
| credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of
| cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in
| the credits.)
|
| SREs is a much more interesting question ; since it's more of
| a "person keeping the lights on" thing than, "person who
| built the thing."
|
| Then again, whose business collapses if they get their name
| written somewhere ?
|
| So SAAS credits would be a "dynamic" thing, in a "credits"
| page that gets updated every so often. Pretty much like the
| credits of this week episode of any TV show is just every so
| slighly different that the previous weeks's one.
|
| > Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come
| first or do you do it alphabetically
|
| Alphabetically. Yes.
|
| And if you really want to overthink it: alphabetically,
| organised by team / department / components / whatever, with
| the name of the "Head xxx" or "Xxx lead" first.
|
| Basically, the same way you publish the org chart of some
| levels of your company. Since Conway's law is the only law,
| your org charts and your products probably have the same
| structure anyway.
|
| Do companies ask people to hide the fact that they are
| "deputy-head-lead of quality synergies" on linkedin, in case
| they are poached ?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy
| get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of
| cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in
| the credits.)
|
| No particular deep knowledge here, but: my impression is
| this was a long and painful push by various unions and
| agents, with "top billing" becoming an actual thing to be
| negotiated as part of an actor's contract, etc. Even having
| the end credits at all seems to be a workaround for
| accomodating the enormous number of people who insist on
| being credited: movies from the 30s seem to be perfectly
| content to just list the production company, the stars, and
| maybe the director at the start.
|
| Of course, it takes at most a couple generations of
| professionals to shift from "this is a thing won through
| hard negotiations" to "this is a thing that everybody is
| entitled to by common morality", but my point is it didn't
| (appear to) start that way, it had to be squeezed out from
| the execs over years.
|
| (Of course movies also don't need maintenance or
| refactoring, at least not in the sense of requiring other
| actors and camera crews to come in.)
| Melatonic wrote:
| It was definitely a thing unions fought for - a big thing
| actually.
|
| This is the reason why there are so many people missing
| on movie credits who worked on the VFX - there is no VFX
| union (there was a huge scheme by some very big name
| assholes back in the day to block it - and a huge court
| settlement). Watch any major Marvel or other VFX heavy
| film and some of the studios will get full credits for
| their teams while other smaller ones will just list the
| studio name, the VFX Supervisor (top of the chain) and a
| few other people. There are tons and tons missing.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _Back in 1985, there weren 't actually any tools that could
| discover this kind of extra data._
|
| Uh, what?
| Cpoll wrote:
| You snipped off some context, though, that makes it a bit more
| reasonable. I think in this context the "tool" would be some
| sort of steganography-detection utility.
|
| _According to Brooks, the hidden dialog was placed in
| encrypted form at the end of the smiley bitmap file included
| with the operating system. Back in 1985, there weren 't
| actually any tools that could discover this kind of extra
| data._
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Disagree. We had hex editors, we were used to looking at
| assembly and machine code. This could absolutely have been
| discovered if someone had looked. Oh, and the encryption was
| a simple XOR.
| [deleted]
| agravier wrote:
| Computers didn't exist!
| danbruc wrote:
| Computers existed, they were just mechanical or human until
| the invention of electrons.
| medstrom wrote:
| Electrons always existed.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Not until the universe was somewhere between one and ten
| seconds old.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#
| Lep...
| adrian_b wrote:
| No, electrons existed as far back as we can model, but
| they were accompanied by an almost equal quantity of
| anti-electrons (positrons).
|
| As long as the temperature was high enough, there was a
| balance between annihilation reactions of electrons and
| positrons and generation of electron-positron pairs.
|
| After the temperature decreased a lot, much lower than
| the temperature where the protons and all the neutrons
| that had not decayed yet had combined into nuclei of
| helium and lithium, all the positrons annihilated with
| most of the electrons, so only a much smaller number of
| electrons survived.
|
| After further cooling, most of the electrons became bound
| to nuclei, and all the matter became plasma, like most of
| the matter in the present universe still is (because most
| of the matter is inside the stars).
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| You are right that I quoted the wrong section.
|
| The earlier section says that the electromagnetic force
| didn't exist in its current form until 10*-12 seconds or
| so, when the electromagnetic and weak forces split from a
| combined "electroweak" force into their current forms.
| danbruc wrote:
| _After further cooling, most of the electrons became
| bound to nuclei, and all the matter became plasma, like
| most of the matter in the present universe still is
| (because most of the matter is inside the stars)._
|
| When electrons bind to nuclei, a plasma turns into a
| neutral gas, this happened in the recombination phase.
| The neutral gas then collapsed into stars which turned
| the gas making up the stars back into plasma. Also the
| energetic photons emitted by stars started turning the
| remaining gas back into a plasma which is called the
| reionization phase.
| Siecje wrote:
| Are we sure there is more than one?
| pmontra wrote:
| How did we get from Easter Eggs to this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe ?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They were only invented in the 1800's by Big Power to
| sell electricity.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Don't be silly, electrons were invented by Benjamin
| Franklin on his garage in Palo Alto.
| bitwize wrote:
| I always liked the story of how Gabe Newell decided to quit
| Microsoft and establish Valve.
|
| The story goes that Newell was doing analytics for Microsoft by
| running software that scanned and reported what people had
| installed on their PCs -- this was back in the Windows 3.x days
| when Microsoft sought consent from the user before doing this
| kind of thing. Microsoft wanted to know how many PCs had Windows
| running on them. Gabe's market research found that a great many
| PCs did have Windows -- Windows was the second most installed
| software on the PCs surveyed.
|
| Number one was Doom.
|
| After that, Gaben started thinking maybe gaming was a better
| play.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Awesome story - and totally makes sense. Gabe was seeing things
| way ahead of his time
| azhenley wrote:
| Fascinating! Any resource you recommend to learn more about
| this origin story?
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "this was back in the Windows 3.x days when Microsoft sought
| consent from the user before doing this kind of thing"_
|
| Since nobody had an Internet connection in those days, it was
| literally impossible to get the data back to Microsoft without
| the user's involvement.
|
| If 1993 Microsoft could have collected this data automatically,
| they certainly would have.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Yeah, I'm curious how exactly this data got back to
| Microsoft. We had a family computer back in the day that
| definitely ran DOS / Windows 3.1 / Doom, so we in theory
| would have been one of those data points. But with no
| internet for another 5-8 years or so, I can say pretty
| confidently that the number of floppies I sent _to Microsoft_
| with data from my computer was a big fat zero.
|
| So how would they have retrieved this data?
| Melatonic wrote:
| I am guessing a floppy mailed back and forth
| pavlov wrote:
| I've been reading Steven Sinofsky's extremely detailed blog
| about those days (it's at
| https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com). He was in
| charge of Office in the late '90s.
|
| He mentions that Microsoft had a program where they
| partnered with large enterprises to collect usage data from
| corporate desktops. But those computers were on a network
| even if though often not on the Internet yet.
|
| Stats that would show Doom towering over Windows 3.1 must
| have been collected manually, maybe by sending people a
| floppy that contained a program to collect the data, and
| asking them to mail it back in. "Insert floppy, then type
| A:\SPY.EXE in your DOS prompt" ...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Since nobody had an Internet connection in those days, it
| was literally impossible to get the data back to Microsoft
| without the user 's involvement._
|
| What makes you think that "nobody" had an internet connection
| in "those days?" We weren't riding around on the backs of
| dinosaurs and cooking up bronto-burgers on the weekends.
|
| Winsock came out in June of 1992, right in the middle of the
| Windows 3.x life cycle.
| pavlov wrote:
| Well, ok. But if the data point is "X% of users have DOOM
| installed but not Windows", how does Winsock help you get
| that data to Microsoft?
|
| I do remember using Winsock on Windows 3.1 to grab Usenet
| updates on expensive dial-up. The batch Internet :)
| ourmandave wrote:
| I wonder when MS solitaire became number 1.
|
| Wikipedia says it originally came with Windows 3.0 back in
| 1990.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire
| pontifk8r wrote:
| Pretty sure that's not what happened. Gabe had a different view
| of how PCs would become a bigger part of entertainment (this is
| in the 90's, when watching video on PCs was heresy!), starting
| with PCs in the living room. He tried to sell management on his
| vision, but this being the old Microsoft, he lost an internal
| battle. He proved his entertainment vision in the best way
| possible -- Building Valve Software by telling great stories,
| making great games, building an ecosystem, and now branching
| into hardware.
| anthk wrote:
| > (this is in the 90's, when watching video on PCs was
| heresy!),
|
| Are you sure? After the multimedia PC, and later videoCD's
| and DivX it wasn't an heresy any more.
| hbn wrote:
| > making great games
|
| I kinda wish they'd dabble back into this area. The Portal
| games are some of the most interesting, atmospheric, and
| well-humoured games I've ever played. And it seems that after
| Portal 2 they got so hooked into VR that all they've really
| made is a bunch of VR demos.
|
| But whatever, the Steam Deck seems like it has the potential
| to really revolutionize a new space in PC gaming, so maybe
| it's better they stay focused on one thing at a time than
| half-assedly do a bunch of things like Microsoft or Google.
| netsharc wrote:
| Article is missing how to trigger it, but the tweet-writer
| doesn't know either:
|
| > Of course Microsoft did a really good job at hiding it and I
| still don't really know how to trigger it. I patched some
| binaries to force it to show up.
|
| https://twitter.com/mswin_bat/status/1504789141816455168
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Maybe there's no trigger. You "trigger" it by inspecting the
| binary. Like how sometimes circuit boards and even circuits
| (even some chips famously) have embedded easter eggs. To some
| degree for someone to discover but more for the authors to
| celebrate their creation.
| tupac_speedrap wrote:
| Is it really an easter egg if you have to change binaries to
| get it to display? Seems more like an unused asset that they
| didn't take out.
| LocalH wrote:
| The triggers were found. It's a straight up egg.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Cut content is what they would call it if it was a video
| game. Easter Egg is as close as a journalist is going to
| get.
| usrusr wrote:
| The "congrats" UI clearly puts it in easter egg territory
| though, even if the intended trigger was cut. Might be
| cut or perhaps the trigger still exists in the released
| binary but hasn't been discovered yet. But easter egg
| would be applicable in either case.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sometimes the trigger would be removed in later development
| but the data left in (or forgotten).
| scrlk wrote:
| One of the DEC Vax chips had an Easter egg message in
| Cyrillic for the Russian engineers who were reverse
| engineering DEC systems to clone:
| https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
| elevaet wrote:
| I wonder if they cloned it complete with the message?
| netsharc wrote:
| I guess your question refers to the cloned B-29 where a
| US factory worker made a wrong rivet hole and this hole
| was cloned by the Soviets?
|
| https://aviationhumor.net/soviet-b-29-clone-the-tupolev-
| tu-4...
| blamazon wrote:
| A parable on Stalinist management technique:
|
| "'What kind of stars should be put on the mass-produced
| aircraft - white American stars or red Soviet ones? If
| you put white stars, you risked being shot as an enemy of
| the people. If you put red, first, it will not be a copy,
| and second maybe Stalin is planning to use the bombers
| against America, England or China, and therefore keep the
| American markings.' The question went all the way up to
| Stalin himself: Beria (NKVD chief, in charge of B-29
| duplication project) 'told Stalin about the stars as if
| it were a funny story and that by the way in which Stalin
| laughed at the joke, Beria knew unerringly which stars
| should be used. The last problem was solved and mass-
| production started...'"
| retrac wrote:
| Alas Communism fell before they could get that far! And
| they would have been better off using German. The Russian
| message was first added to the '87 CVAX. But Robotron (an
| East German company) had only just started their first
| runs [1] of the '85 MicroVAX 78032 clone in 1990 when the
| company was liquidated.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U80701
| ungruntled wrote:
| Any site that hijacks the back button to show you ads is similar
| to a creep locking you briefly in a room so you 'consider' their
| offer.
| 10729287 wrote:
| I don't understand all those mentions of websites hijacking
| back buttons. I've been able to use it in both my main browser,
| Firefox with Ublock origin, and Vanilla MS Edge.
| kyrra wrote:
| It tends to be a bigger issue on mobile, where very few
| people block ads.
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| It's been horrendous on mobile lately. Sometimes it'll
| still hijack my back button on desktop with ublock and
| privacy badger.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I wonder why. Firefox Mobile has uBlock Origin too. Can't
| believe people can bear to open a browser without it. If it
| didn't have uBlock, I would save the web browsing mostly
| for the desktop.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I thought this only applies to Android?
|
| I think Firefox on iOS uses webkit and doesn't support
| addons. There is firefox focus which does block ads but
| also only supports one tab at a time.
| brimble wrote:
| Focus can act as an ad blocker for Safari too, IIRC.
|
| IIRC because I think that's what I did before I had a
| PiHole doing most of that, but I can't remember for sure.
| rwalle wrote:
| You can do it on iOS:
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-content-blockers-
| saf...
| DelilahHoare wrote:
| Which is surprising because mobile is especially unusable
| without ad blocking.
| Findecanor wrote:
| As if three popups wasn't enough to make users not want to
| visit the site every again ...
| [deleted]
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| More surprising than that it took 37 years to find the easter
| egg, is that 37 years on from its release, someone with the tech
| skills to find it was bored enough to waste time sifting rough
| Windows 1.0 binaries looking for ... anything. There wasn't
| anything worth the effort it took to write in Windows 1.0 when it
| was brand new.
| xattt wrote:
| I can see this as a psyops strategy by adverse actors: provide
| enough time-wasting entertainment to drain away the creativity
| of a nation.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Strategic offensive nerd-sniping.
| ale42 wrote:
| "This" as the ancient-easter-egg-finding, or as spending days
| on youtube?
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| China + TikTok for sure.
| notRobot wrote:
| Agreed 100%. Windows 1.0 was way before my time, and I have no
| idea where I would even start if I wanted to sift through those
| binaries or patch them like this person did.
|
| I hope all of this information about legacy systems is
| documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of
| it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and
| worked with these systems get older and pass away.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Look up retrocomputing -- lots of people preserving history
| for fun.
| protontorpedo wrote:
| With the enormous amount of time we all waste in cheap
| entertainment this days, I think the willingness to spend as
| much time digging and tweaking and hacking is to be celebrated.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Some people binge 200 hours of so-called reality TV a week.
| Others dig into the code of dead operating systems.
|
| I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be
| considered more worthy of one's time than the other.
| openknot wrote:
| One of the most hardworking people I know, who is
| academically accomplished and had an extraordinarily high
| amount of research experience as an undergraduate, spent
| most of his free time on mindless reality TV.
|
| He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from
| his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies
| would drain him further.
| protontorpedo wrote:
| That's absolutely fair and I'm not trying to imply that
| cheap entertainment is all bad. It was more of a reaction
| to the parent comment, which seemeed to imply that the
| endeavour wasn't worth it.
| jatone wrote:
| but i do both simultaneously.... the tv is background
| noise.
| msl wrote:
| Yeah, figuring out how to fit 200 hours of anything into
| 168 hours seems like a worthy endeavor indeed.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| You could just squeak by if you watched it on 1.25s
| speed. You'd even have 8 hours to nap or go to the
| bathroom!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| You could increase your throughput with multiple monitors
| to simultaneously view multiple episodes. A bit of gaze
| detection and audio could switch to whichever feed your
| eyes focused on.
| Someone wrote:
| On the plus side, there's not much sifting to do. The OS ran in
| 256 kilobytes of memory, and shipped on five 51/4 inch floppy
| disks.
|
| Given the size of the code, once you've found the dialog, I
| guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn't too hard
| (a fuzzer that you can ask "give me a series of inputs that
| gets this procedure called" might even answer that question for
| you)
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Maybe this was the result of an educational exercise.
| Archaeologists will similarly sift through piles of sand to
| find little fragments from the past. Or could have been a
| challenge done simply for fun. Not necessarily "bored".
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hey, maybe it wasn't a fruitless endeavour.. maybe someone was
| confused as to why a graphical shell was so tiny in comparison
| to his main electronjs app and decided to poke at tiny native
| code / assembler.
| enoent wrote:
| Supposedly there's an easter egg in Windows CE's Solitaire [1]
| that has never managed to surface, beyond someone posting part of
| the credits text in a comment. No screenshots, videos, or any
| other evidence of its existence.
|
| It's an exercise in frustration. Following the posted steps
| doesn't activate it in qemu or virtual pc (other vms don't seem
| to support Windows CE). Could be buggy virtualization, could be
| that it only exists in a particular version of Windows CE
| (judging from the date it was posted, maybe 2.11/3.0/HPC2000), or
| only in some OEM's custom ROM. Even if you wanted to dig into the
| ROM, strings are encoded in some LZ77 variant, so nothing
| greppable upfront. ROM dumping tools were made for extracting
| specific ROMs (you never know which ones and which offsets
| exactly), and are pretty much undocumented. Still plenty reverse
| engineering effort to be done.
|
| [1]: https://eeggs.com/items/487.html
| ok123456 wrote:
| If you want the history behind early Windows, read "Barbarians
| Lead by Bill Gates." Windows 1.0 a direct response to a demo from
| VisiCorp for a graphical desktop environment called "Visi On" [1]
| in 1982.
|
| Some other things in that book that I learned: Microsoft passed
| on the opportunity to use Postscript. Windows running in
| protected mode started as someone's summer skunkworks project at
| a time when the company assumed that OS/2 was the actual future.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On
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