<jargon> (From the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in
the US and many parts of Europe)
1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a
joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or
browsing the code.
2. A message, graphic, sound effect, or other behaviour
emitted by a program (or, on an IBM PC, the BIOS ROM) in
response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,
intended as a joke or to display program credits.
One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of
operating systems caused them to respond to the command
"make love" with "not war?". Many personal computers, and
even satellite control computers, have much more elaborate
eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names
(e.g. Microsoft Windows 3.1x), political exhortations and
snatches of music. The Tandy Color Computer 3 (CoCo) had
images of the entire development team. Microsoft Excel 97
includes a flight simulator!
http://www.eeggs.com/.
[Jargon File]
(2003-06-23)
Nearby terms:
EASE II « EASIAC « EAST « easter egg » Easter egging » Eastern Washington University » EASY FOX
