New Windows Easter Egg Discovered - And I'm in it! 

"I'm not a fan of hidden payloads." Pity he doesn't work for Microsoft today.

"nuclear reactor" haha, i had a laugh thinking about that. A critical terminal is being operated in a panic during a meltdown when a naive easter egg appears on screen triggered by pressing space three times. The screen reads "Dave rules and is awesome" locked while playing a laborious mono tone tune to completion.

Great video. Would love to hear about the “Comfy chair.”

We still use Windows 3.1 at work, to run our analytical instruments.

I don't think easter eggs are a matter of Ego in the negative sense. I think it showcases the humanity behind a lot of these monolithic and often outwardly sterile-looking creations. People getting hysterical about the Excel doom-clone using up memory when it's not even activated is just an early example of people that today might be out there burning down 5G cell towers or wearing spiritual stones to protect themselves from radiation because they don't know any better.

It would be interesting to know how many non-game pieces of software that Microsoft has released where the credits were openly accessible in the documentation. Putting in hidden credits into software because the company officially won't goes at least as far back as the early Atari games, where the coders had to find ways to try and gain public recognition for their work while the company above actively denied them the ability to do so officially.

So funny that you worked on the OLE team at that time. I was working for a Market Research company and we were trying to use OLE with the 16/32-bit thunking layer and it constantly crashed on us. So much so that we added an Easter Egg to our About dialog that popped up a "Crash Preferences" dialog box. It had a list of radio buttons: Crash app, Crash all apps, Crash Network, Crash Now ... and finally "Don't crash" which was grayed out.

It's fun how you don't say particularly much about the results of that "reply all", yet your expression and tone says quite a lot.

Cardinal Fang, FETCH... THE COMFY CHAIR! (Btw, nice video, and thanks for crediting me :D)

I really like the "free stream of thought" style of this video. Sounds more friendly and personal.

And that 'doom in excel' thing was nothing compared to the flight sim in the next version

And people thought Google was the first cool tech company. Microsoft was cool, back in the day. And now Google isn't cool either. So it goes.

As an end user I love easter eggs in software. When you see a hidden screen with photos and names you realize there where real people working on it, who cared and are proud of the work they did. It makes it just a little more personal and maybe it made some people even feel bad about pirating the software.

couldn't disagree more with regards to easter eggs. They show the human side to the people and company instead of it being just dry, professional blandness. It gives abit of fun and enjoyment for people who like to find or experience them as well. All the downsides you listed are either easily resolved through not just allowing a wild west approach and ensuring they are suitable and reasonable and far less an issue than other common windows practices of the past (inserting fake error messages to scare users from using Dr Dos) and especially today (forcing analytics and spying on the user without an opt out just at best the option to "only send basic information"). I find Windows 10s policies on forcing updates against my will in the background despite repeated attempts to stop it far more concerning.

After watching a bunch of your videos, I decided to learn C++. Thank you !

The most cringe-inducing Easter egg of all time was the zzzzzz egg in Word 97

The closest thing I ever did to an Easter egg: The internal software the corporation runs on was being modernized by throwing a Windows GUI over its mainframe base. When I got there it was total shit. I threw out 90% of the work because it was just a waste of code, and took what the mainframe gave me and threw it on the screen, then took what the user was trying to do and threw it back to the mainframe. Super simple. Followed the KISS principal and it went from unusable to far far ahead of schedule. So I was stuck twiddling my thumbs... And had discovered how to animate stuff without flicker in windows. This is back when DirectX was new and it actually was not that easy to move objects around in Windows natively with no extra code without flicker. Dave knows a bit about this from working on task manager. Anyway as more of a programming exercise than anything else, I took the logo which was round like a ball and made it so if you double clicked it on the help/about screen... It bounced in around the frame it was in. It was one of those typical ones where the logos on one side and then all of the information is in a big text box on the other half of that window. So you had half of a window for it to bounce around in. Well simple bouncing physics are just changing direction when you hit a wall, no acceleration or deceleration or any of the interesting math... So I made it to have a paddle at the bottom so you could smack the logo and have it bounce around. That's it. No score, no point, but it was just a little bit of code that I worked on because I was curious on how it would work and I really needed to kill some company time because I did too good of a job and did not want to get fired for not working on something even though they had no idea what I'd be working on. This isn't a software company, this is a company that's using the software. So I guess I made an Easter egg, but it isn't The operating system. It's not critical. And I kind of think it was no big deal.

Does your NDA expire? Or is it worded in a way that it never expires? Now I am curious

I really miss how fancy and amazing Windows 95 felt after coming from a Tandy 1000 with DOS 3.22 and Tandy Deskmate. Nothing before or since has ever felt like such a jump.

I noticed you were not working off a script about 25% through the video. You do well in both formats. I like the variety. Great topic too.

That's awesome :D

Sounds like when you sent that reply all to the massive alias, you may have been code complete, but you were probably in need of a few service packs, which it sounds like you managed to obtain over the years.

I think Easter eggs have their place although yes they can go to far. A random teapot in the pipe screen saver I don't think so that's a fun little almost glitch ( hey there's a weird bug in the pipe saver and we're documenting that we don't know why we get a random tea pot every so often we can't figure it out). There are sometimes when you have to hide something to get the credits in otherwise they should be in there but that's generally just a bad work place if you're not allowed to / not getting credit. And there's been many a case of hidden code being useful for provability.

Even delayed recognition is fun. I got a patent during my time at Microsoft Research but I left and the department got reorged multiple times so I never got my patent plaque and nobody seemed to know what admin had taken over the old department's records so I ordered one myself for the closure.

The "upgrade to windows 10" adverts were malicious. No way to remove them. Even if you registry hack, delete it from system32, etc. Uninstall the update. It always came back and always re-downloaded W10 into C:/"Some-rando-key-name."

The best Easter eggs are the subtle ones, like Gates' mugshot as the default profile picture in older version of Outlook or theme colors of Groove/MP similar to Zune's ones

Microsoft programmer: "people don't like hidden payloads" NOWAY!! REALLY?!

A friend of mine in the ship engineering industry told me there are custom versions of Windows made for the UK Royal Navy submarines named colloquially, "Windows for Warships". (Wikipedia has more info!) You can understand not wanting Easter Eggs in that!

I remember seeing that second egg back in the 90's. Unless another egg used the same clouds interface with the names floating by? Wherever it was I know I haven't seen it in 20+ years. Thanks! Edit: just watched a video of it with the MIDI music too. Wow, I'm instantly 25 again.

Have you read the book “Showstopper”, which chronicled the development of NT 3.51?

Personally I really enjoyed hearing about, and then initiating, the flight simulator easter egg in Excel back in the day.

As much as I like hídden easter eggs in anything, be it normal software or OS, I agree with your view on it. However I love them in games :D Feel like in games they're perfect fit.

How do you used to manage your source control back to the days of win 95 development I think Git was not yet developed back then?

Dogs and cats, living together, Mass Hysteria!

lol Dave....you forgot your mug link!!! Awesome video, I LOVE these stories. As someone that grew up with 3.1, I was the kid learning computers and dreaming of working at MS while I learned the you and the team were making. I didn't join till 98se, so I missed a lot of this era. It's really cool to hear the behind the scenes.

Add multithreading to dragrace, allow cpu;s to utilize them fully.

Easter eggs are nice for entertainment software like games, I agree OSes and business applications should be free of those.

Could you tell us about what programming was like back then?The tools you used, how testing and debugging was done...

little Pi gonna beat 'em all! (It only depends on how much of them you have)

Who else ran windows 2000 on their desktops before XP was a thing.

I would have liked to hear more on the repercussions of that email, if any. In any case, another great story!

Honestly... I don't agree with you on 'Easter eggs' while there is most certainly a point of 'way to much', and it certainly introduces new vectors to worry about.... I would point out that if your first group of thoughts about 'Easter egg' is 'subversive code that's meant to harm my system'... then honestly, I think there are far larger issues at hand then that & while 'hidden code' can be an issue..... it's always a neat thing to hit an Easter egg or two meant for enjoyment. Also, I gotta say.. maybe there is something to it really think about if your response to an Easter egg for what amounts to the developers of x thing... is to be 'cranky' and attack it... Perhaps I would point out that while social skills are something, the larger point would be ... maybe you need to evaluate your reasons for it, as they geniunely seem irrational. The excuse for 'open source' software is ... honestly laughable, how many have genuinely checked the code for their programs & OS.. throughly, then the code of the compliers used for them & then the reverse engineered code for the compiler used. -- an attiage about the fallacy of 'open source' only having what you write... as the obvious entry point into it is the compiler... be it python, some other JIT, or a pre-copmpiled C language. is that you can never know at any level of certainty in any way what so ever, that the compilers used to achieve these results, themselves do not have compromised self replicating code... that can be aware enough to understand if it's some kiddies 'hello world' example, or other testing program, or if it's something critically sensitive like a kernal, a security program, or file system manager of some kind. and inject compromising code into the ones where it would get results more likely then naught. === Remember.... That's the crowd that goes out of their way to brag & dance about 'being able to see the source code', but always forgets they can't see the source code of the compiler, or decompiled code of the compiler used. ~~ Major weakpoint in security.. and honestly, we wouldn't 'know for sure' till it was too late. i mean, as sure... the same coudl be done to close systems like windows.. but frankly... I'm ok with knowing that's a possibility and not fooling myself as to the possibility that it's clean.

Early '97, our IT guy called and offered me NT4.0 to test. I was running some higher end CAD ware (higher end at the time). Became an instant celebrity on the engineering deck as everyone wanted to see NT. They were so pissed when they got Win98SE instead of NT at the next upgrade cycle... and I kept my NT4.0. 😎

Do you make sells on this mug? I might buy it! If you want to sell more, make it *just a bit* more obvious where to buy em! I know, every dumbass can figure that out, it is just that if something is very clear, even at subconscious level, one is very more willing to process that!

Joe Walsh laughed at your videos and told me that Life's Been Good was written at the same time that a monochrome TV Pong game was "high tech". You might want to change your intro sound clip to use Afternoon Delight from the Starland Vocal Band.

nice video dave :), loved the divide by zero story, also.. being the guy who created Zip folders and Task manager damn that is pure genius, Task manager believe it or not has saved my systems quite alot over the years, Microsoft should Give you a phat reward for those, if it wasn't for those two innovative ideas, I think windows would have struggled more in the mainstream desktop sector, gl dude keep up the great vids xD.

Windows 311 was one of my favourite versions.

Visual Studio had an Easter egg where you flew over a 3D landscape made up developer's faces. I am pretty sure that we exchanged emails back when I was in developer support at MS.

what was that excell cell that would say something about bill gates. i remember it was like office 97. jesh that’s ages ago.

the comfy chair.. monty python reference?

The nuclear reactor comment & Easter eggs making insecure systems - isn't that something they alluded to in Jurassic park?

It's an honor to actually see a real windows dev I have alot of respect for you man honestly a real life genius I watch your videos religiously Recently got laid of work very stressful time but watching you really is better then my anti depressants

another great video with a thumbs up.

I admit my first thought hearing about this was, “I wonder if Dave is in it.”

I remember the clouds Easter egg from years ago. Long winded to trigger IIRC. I think it was found quite quickly and one of the PC magazines covered it in detail at the time. I put a semi hidden BOFH excuse generator in a simple help desk logging system I wrote ~20 years ago. (Internal system used by me and the team) It got old very quickly... Thanks for the video, it is great to get your perspective on these sort of things.

5:24 Is that Monty Python's Easter EGG?

So what is "the comfy chair" story?

I know isn't it annoying when I get a bulk email but then people start doing reply-all with things like "thanks you're great" and "why am I on this list" when I didn't even care for the initial email 😆

I remember the Easter Egg in Windows 98 screensaver, when you had entered the word "volcano", names of actual volcanos appeared on the screen!

Wasnt there a flight sim easter egg in excel

Easter eggs are cool to find in stuff like video games, in business applications I agree it is better to leave them out.

Hi there! Greetings from Romania. I was a Microsoft fan back in the days. I really enjoyed Microsoft as a company and model in the Bill Gates era. Don't know it was another philosophy even with the UI, the brand names and so. Now, I cannot say the same. I work on MS-DOS because we need at Turbo Pascal / C, later Boralnd Pascal and Borland C++. Then I enjoyed Windows 3.1, WIndows 95 :). My 1st computer was a Z80 spectrum clone... well PC were expensive and I remember my 1st one was a Pentrium with MMX technology build for the Windows 95 era but at that moment Windows 98 was on the horinzont so I had Windows 95 for a few days and then decided to run Windows 98 Beta2, then the RC builds which I got from some guys. I loved the titlebar gradient. Oh, great memories! I remember that cartoon-based chat that was available in Windows 98... ah and the built-in MP3 codec that I need to install by adding support for NetMeeting... Oh God! :) Despite many people hate Windows Me, I liked it because of its Windows 2000 UI look and less demanding hardware resources. I remember the 9x handled well some old tv-tuner cards... overlay support was better. :)

Fun Challance: Make a video where you use Win98 and go online and try to get it infected with Malware/virus. That is not easy...

"I'm not a fan of hidden payloads" - I literally just watched your Microsoft BOB episode where you shipped half a billion copies of BOB with XP... lmao :) Keep up the great work, love the videos!

Dave, you get a thumbs up for the SpaceX hat :)

I’ll be sure to fire up good old NT4 after the premiere to try this out.

Dave do you have any shirts

Bill Gates was the first MS Employee to put Easter Eggs in Microsoft BASIC. Applesoft BASIC has the word Microsoft encrypted in ROM.

I still have my Windows NT Workstation 4.0 1-2 CPU 486/Pentium/MIPS/R4x00/Alpha/PowerPC/Pentium Pro CD.. might have to load it into a VM and check this out :D

One of my favourite things was all the parodies that popped up surrounding Clippy from MS office. I know he was just trying to help, but sometimes you just wanted to tell him to go away using less than clean language.

I grew up on Dos, Win 1, 95, 98, NT, XP 7.... oh hey we're back to using windows 1 now...? It's like Lamborghini deciding that the design and styling of a tractor was actually better than a Diablo, let's go back there... Oh and lets get rid of every special purpose tool for the new cars so you once again have to build your own... (I use RegEdit more with Win 10 than I had to with XP!) Whats more, lets make several ways to get to the carburetor but instead of ending up in the same place, we'll make 3-4 different places that you tune your fuel from. I used to LOVE the operating system... I used to tune the freak out of it and pass on bits to my users (I was an EDS Field tech with 750 staff to keep running). I HATE Win8,10. It's like MS said.. Stuff the office worker, we're going to make a Dos shell for gamers. I feel like crawling into my Spectrum 48k package box and crying a little. When I buy something.. I don't want it full of adverts.. thats why I bought it, to get rid of "If you want it free, you get Adds". All I get from Win 10 is "Buy Me", "Connect to Here", "You NEED an X-Box"... As A kid I saw an IBM clone in Mobil NZ running mainframe emmulation and thought "THIS IS IT... This is where computers are going... a personal PC to do all your work, with access to a mainframe for the bulk of the shared data"... but the IT boffins were shunned from the Mainframe boffins and it was just me in the Network group working with the wizz kid in the IT dept ahat actually talked and got them access to the patch rooms (all co-ax back then.. what was an Either net?) I used to enjoy finding bugs. I worked directly as an IT end field tech with techs from Co's like Attachmate because I didn't know any better than to just contact them and say.. hey there's a bug our users have with the keyboard maps... Oddly I got a lot of good feedback from them as it turned out I was one of the only ways they were getting some feedback on some glaring obvious problems.. but then gave them some end users to test it in a real world... way round the globe in NZ... Via mainframe Mail... sigh... I was on internal helpdesks for EDS, Telecom NZ, Mobil and Field tech to more vie Fujitsu NZ... I was a Dell cert tech and ended up pointing out things to Dell like the D620 being shipped with a paper thin airgap between the CPU/GPU shared heatsync and the GPU (which failed drastically to the point where I was replacing up to 4 laptops a day in one building.. I could swap out test ok one in 15 mins in a perfect run... Now I fix machinery... And have something to show for my effort... 25 years of IT and ... nothing... nope.. nothing I can point at and say "I helped with that".... Stories yes... Physical.. Nup. I can walk down Wellington and say I put in that pole, I worked on that diorama clock, I fixed their steam cleaner.... Way less pay.. Way more satisfying. (Not that I didn't make money from IT.. I own my house and was never in Dept, and got so good the helpdesk didn't like me as I fixed 30% of my calls without passing it on to the 2nd level or h/w field techs... When I left, I saw overseas HD's take my place where they were trying to get users to rebuild their laptop... when it was obviously a hardware issue.... I still run into staff 15y later saying it was a joke once local knowlege was dumped for the false economy of an overseas helpdesk (That's where you save $1 by giving it to a foreign company.. but you don't care about having just made your country $1 poorer and in the same time made 1 job less available to your fellow countrymen, while downsizing every time a group finished a project until you had no staff. Imagine a Taxi firm selling a taxi every year so it shows a profit on the books... Great until the day you have no taxis left... Rock on EDS...

I think there might be a misspelling on the thumbnail

I still have a complete Nt 4.0 toolchain. Nt 40 server workstation, office, visual studio, set of MSN CD, backoffice, think everything.

What do you think of Easter eggs in code and commits? Examples of things I've actually done: - I once wrote test code which had to start from a table of FX rates, so as a true Brit i went and found the highest exchange rate to the dollar i could (~5:1) and added a silly patriotic comment next to it. - i once wrote a multi-thousand character commit referencing Hamlet and Yorrick - titled "Alas poor , I knew him well" - which removed a single line //to-do comment and removed the last reference to this chap (who no one remembered) in our code base.

As a QA'er, I'm also not a fan of Easter Eggs. It's one more thing to test. I stumbled on the one in our product that the engineer put in without telling anyone. It scrolled names and played a massive WAV file -- in a downloadable product when dial-up was still prevalent (the Easter Egg was far bigger than the product itself). It was also copyrighted music. And this was a CTO/Ops focused no nonsense product, so Easter Eggs kinda don't belong, especially with the huge WAV file visible in the file system. I forget how this was handled. I think they overruled me but did supply a smaller file for the music.

i put my easter eggs mostly when my exe was modified, its just like putting logoff.exe to startup registry and stuff, nothing dangerous, just fun

Windows 98SE and NT4 where good!. Lets not talk about win-ME. Couldnt find any eggs in freebsd, lol. Im sure theres some funny comments tho (raspberry 4). Linux sl program, to teach youngsters about the impotence of writing correct in bash!, could that be a easter egg?

You have knowledge of writing serious Amiga commercial software, and worked at Microsoft core dev team writing complex parts of the most popular operating systems at the time. I so wish I had a friend with your knowledge all those years. Probably I would have annoyed you with so many questions like; why are there gazzilion typedefs in Windows (i.e. why lpcstr instead of char*, or BYTE instead of unsigned char, etc..) it's so hard to memorize, what was the wisdom behind that? And did it annoy you too when you first discovered that working on Windows?

Cool cool. Now what's the story about the ORIGINAL release Win95 (pre IE4 integration) Start Menu Alt + Minus context menu which would allow you to close or move the Start button itself? Whose silly idea was that, and was that intentional?

I heard you say "reply all" and I was thinking, "uh oh... He crashed the email system." But no... That didn't happen. Good. :-)

The Excel Easter egg was one of the greatest of all time and, no offence, I don't care if some "neckbeards" back in the day were worried about RAM usage. It's a beautiful demonstration of creativity in spite of the dryness of the product and the industrial giant you people were working for. Something that would be impossible in today's streamlined and complete, as Marx called it, "alienated work."

yea there was another excel one (maybe in office 2000) that had a flight simulator on it, perfect waste of disk space when I was eeking by on a pentium MMX laptop with like a 1gb drive for school (in the days of 1Ghz cpu's and 40GB drives becoming common) and windows 2000, which I had to have for wifi support with the card I happened to scavenge took up most of the disk

I put an easter egg in my uni's website, because I knew I wouldn't get credit for my work. A certain combination of links clicked would add an extra footer that would add my name, email address and phone number. It landed me my first job, because the interviewer couldn't believe I wrote my uni's website alone (it's a very reputed uni - more reputed than I thought it deserved, lol!). Surprisingly, it stayed for around for over 10 years after I post-graduated, when the website was rewritten from scratch - so it was never detected :D

I wrote a frontend (GUI) for restaurant/bar table service. I skinned all the buttons to look like colourful clear jelly candies. One night, after a bit of drinking, sillyness got the best of me. Short story. I created an animation to squish buttons, and let their liquid filling drip down the screen. I made it trigger by counting too many (20+) presses of any same button. As these were ēlo touchscreen systems, that made it all more funny. FYI: No real candies were harmed in the making of Easter Egg.

When I made Easter eggs, did I reuse the already existing code, maybe adding a triple-click on a particular spot, but it maybe added a few bites to the whole project.

Speaking of easter eggs. Dave, what's up with the Teddy Bear? jdbgmgr.exe under System32. I know it was linked to a virus hoax, but I'd love to hear about the bear's origins.

I've never regretted an email ... I'm 40... but it's not a fair comparison... you could count all the emails I wrote because I had to because it was part of my job on your hands... you could fit every email I've ever sent in my entire life on a 16gb storage medium ... that's with media attachments. I have single comments here on RU-vid that are probably bigger that that (I exaggerate for comedic effect... but only slightly)... so yeah, not a fair comparison. With so few emails spread over so many years, it's easy to be extremely cautious with your words, I basically only write emails when I absolutely have to. Since the early to mid 90's email hasn't impressed me as IRC and bulletin boards / forums and text messaging where all available methods to get digital text to other people and they all seemed superior... back in those days it was not uncommon for an email to take a day or two to go through, the others where... well, consistently faster... by enough to allow fluid conversation. I think that's what it really comes down to... I just prefer fluid conversation.

I put an Easter egg in a early 2000s Ericsson cell phone. I collected 200 some names of people who worked on the phone and pasted that list into MS Paint using a tiny font size (5). The bitmap width was the same as the phone display width and the height was long enough to fit all the names. Upon a certain key sequence, we displayed the bitmap, which can be scrolled. This was back in the monochrome display era. The phone was the Ericsson R280 and the key sequence was menu 0 menu 0 menu 0. 5 point font was the smallest size that you could actually make out the letters.

Ha, I work with CNC machine’s running NT and locked down most of the time to the HMI because in those days people should never use the computer for anything but it’s express purpose... not sure if Microsoft did that for Siemens or if Siemens did that for themselves but it can be a real pain to work with when practically everything is coded for proprietary use and hardware. Even the bios is custom. Uffda!

Is Windows 2000 the only Windows without easter eggs? Even the 3D text and pipes screen savers don't have their easter eggs. Enter volcano in 3D text in other versions and it'll show the names of volcanic moountains in the western USA. Do that in Win 2000 and all you get is volcano. The Utah Teapot never makes an appearance in 3D pipes in Windows 2000.

“Not a fan of hidden payloads” omg I love you.

IIRC they actually do promise no Easter eggs these days for government/DOD contract reasons. Also I’m all in for any WinNT videos, I was always a fan of NT.

Can't recall which Windows OS, but there's also a flight sim hidden, called up by some ridiculous key sequence. You'd fly around and the names of the various coders would pop up. Although I kinda fancied the Amiga 1000 Easter egg of the signature names of the designers molded in the plastic case.

LoL nuclear Reactors and Easter eggs …. You don’t even want me to START.EXE ⏰⚛️☢️✅

Remember when Doug Dobbins ran for city council? There are few names in there I recognize. Yuri Starikov is the real email king though, once it became Outlook Express.

Gotta disagree to this one. Especially the new gens. My daughter & her friends are CRAZY bout Easter eggs. She'll buy a game just for the Easter eggs (and never play it.)

Since we are talking about old thing and you have a lot to with the problem, you might have a why to fix it. I have a software+hardware that need Windows XP to run. I had to reinstall, but now I get no answer from the license server. Is there a way to check if the server is still active? At the moment I have to reinstall every month.

Easter Eggs never annoyed me because I never need to load the programs containing the Easter Eggs in them. Why someone, "running" a nuclear power plant, would be messing around with these "side-programs" and actually trigger the Easter Egg is beyond me.

Great Video, Dave. I know because of the complexity of some of your topics, you need a script or outline, but I much prefer you Extemporaneous vs scripted

Love the SpaceX hat.