easter egg
<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
|
