Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION The 5 most epic computer Easter eggs
VIRTUALISATION The 5 most epic computer Easter eggs | The 5 most epic computer Easter eggs |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Tuesday, 14 April 2009 | |
|
Page 1 of 3   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Some of these are the subject of speculation. For instance, one of Microsoft's early implementations of BASIC was called GW-BASIC. Official sources claim this means "Gee Whiz BASIC" because it offered support for colour and flashy effects. Yet, the head guy behind the language was Greg Whitten. Could it in fact be, as some old Microsoft insiders suggest, that the product was named after him? Similarly, is it merely coincidence that Microsoft's Windows NT operating system was named such? Officially, "NT" stands for "New Technology" but it was designed by David Cutler, who was poached from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) after developing their VAX VMS operating system. Keen minded people note that if you add one to each of the letters in VMS you get WNT. There are absolutely thousands of Easter eggs in the wild, so much so that web sites exist where fellow treasure hunters can share their discoveries with each other. One particularly notable site is Eeggs.com (note, that’s two e’s and two g’s) which includes such remarkably eagle-eyed observations as a fake FBI warning at the beginning of the Fight Club DVD which is actually a message by Tyler. Yet, just like Hershey’s doesn’t taste as nice as Cadbury’s, so too not all Easter eggs are created equal. Here’s my list of the five most epic Easter eggs in computing. Hopefully some of these will be new to you. Ideally, all will be interesting. On the final page you can leave comments and I’d definitely invite you to let me know your list. The first According to Gamespot the first ever Easter egg took place on the Atari 2600 way back in 1980. Atari programmer Warren Robinett had been producing a video game version of the original text adventure game by Crowther and Woods. However, at the time designers weren’t given credit for their games. Consequently, Robinett decided to inject some for himself. It wasn’t an easy find; in the depths of the black castle there is a hidden single-pixel gray dot on the game map which is the entrance to a special room. The pixel wasn’t easy to locate because it was the same colour as the game’s background. Yet, entering the room reveals the text “Created by Warren Robinett” running down the middle. As those of us who grew up in the early era of home computing know, memory was a scarce commodity back then. Today you can get video cards with 1GB of RAM. Back then, you were doing well if your micro had more than 16KB. That’s kilobytes – as in one thousandth of a MB, itself one thousandth of a GB. So, this little screen actually ate up 5% of the available memory for the game but Robinett insists he didn’t sacrifice any features but added the feature only after the game was complete. The room was fairly obscure so Atari chose not to pay the cost to remaster the cartridge. So, not only was this the first Easter egg ever, but showed from the beginning companies generally look at the existence of such with much less enthusiasm than their employees. Coming up over the page – more memorable Easter eggs from Commodore and Microsoft! |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
