Happy Easter everyone.

We all think of Easter eggs as the wonderfully decorated eggs and candy or prize filled plastic eggs hunted by kids of all ages on Easter.

Easter eggs have been a part of the software industry for a long time too. Like the annual pastime of hunting in the yard or park for the hidden orbs, software Easter eggs are hidden within applications by developers. In the 80′s software was dry and almost all business. Shrink wrapped and tightly following rigid specifications, there was little room for artistic creativity. Software engineers exercised some creativity by embedding Easter eggs within applications. Often the business folks are unaware of the hidden elements.

So what is an Easter egg in the context of a software application? It varies widely but often it’s some kind of attribution to the development team. Remember how there was always a likeness of Alfred Hitchcock in his movies? Often that’s the spirit of an Easter egg. Sometimes it’s an embedded picture of the development team. Sometimes it’s an animated movie credit scrolling by. Sometimes it was much more – like an entire game hidden within a business application. In the Office 97 suite, Excel had a hidden flight simulator; Word had a hidden pinball game; and Access had a hidden Magic 8 ball game. Excel 95 had a hidden game called “The Hall of Tortured Souls” which was a clone of Doom.

Finding the hidden eggs was deliberately obfuscated. For example, to launch the Doom clone in Excel 95 you needed to open a new, empty worksheet, select row 95, press the[tab] key, then select Help –> About from the menu, then press and hold [ctrl] and [shift] while clicking on Tech Support button.