from the who-remembers-when-Windows-95-was-released? dept.
Windows 95 Easter egg discovered after being hidden for 25 years:
When developing software, it is not uncommon for developers to slip in a secret hidden feature, message, or even a mini-game, that users can discover by performing particular actions in a program.
[...] This week, a new Easter egg in Windows 95's Internet Mail program has been discovered by Windows hacker and developer Albacore, opening a secret window that displays a scrolling list of the developer's names.
Before this discovery, there is no known mention of this Easter egg, meaning it has remained undiscovered for close to 25 years.
[...] To access the Easter egg, users need to launch Internet Mail, click on Help, and then About. When the About screen opens, click on the listed comctl32.dll file, so it becomes highlighted, and then type MORTIMER on your keyboard.
After typing 'mortimer,' a small window will be displayed that will begin to list the Internet Mail developer's names, as shown in the video above that was shared with BleepingComputer.
See the linked story on Bleeping Computer for links to this Easter egg and another one for Windows 95 itself.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @12:39PM (3 children)
They were too busy writing Easter eggs to do any bug testing on the OS itself. I'm certain that the team codified its best practices and passed them on to the Win10 developers.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:29PM (2 children)
The Easter Egg was in an application called "Internet Mail", for which the Easter Egg mentions a testing team consisting of nine people. I don't know about the OS, but this application apparently received some testing.
On the other hand, they had four managers, managing eight programmers...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @03:36PM (1 child)
(quote modified for "four" instead of "eight")
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday March 29 2021, @05:22AM
Just saw this again on the weekend! The wife mentioned she'd never seen it - I quickly rectified that mistake.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:10PM (1 child)
Disclosed, after original developer frustrated it went undiscovered for so long
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @01:52PM
Yeah, Mortimer's touchy that way.
(Score: 5, Funny) by inertnet on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:11PM (2 children)
Were the developers too ashamed of their product that they opted to hide their names?
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:49PM
So yes.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @10:02PM
At that time corps did not want to list who worked on things. Do not 'get it'? Here is a hint: it gives recruiters a list of people to recruit from. Suddenly you lost 2 of your dev leads to other companies for 20k more and you do not want to pay that as it is not in your budget.
Many devs still wanted that 'street cred' so they would hide it somewhere in the code.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @03:40PM
blow both of my cocks
(Score: 1) by why_percent on Sunday March 28 2021, @03:59PM
At one time you could freeze the timer on minesweeper with a key combination. I used to do this in high school and freak people out.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Sunday March 28 2021, @05:48PM (3 children)
Why?
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @09:13PM
Because diversity hires are necessary for quotas, but don't have the skills to do anything useful.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 28 2021, @10:15PM
How: I'd bet the hacker was using a disassembly tool on the code and spotted the MORTIMER keyword, it's not the kind of thing you'd stumble into.
Why: LULZ and notoriety.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @03:23AM
Why do people restore old cars? Everybody needs a hobby.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @12:06AM (2 children)
Wait, did Win95 even have a networking stack? Wasn't that a later paste-on? So how could there have been an Internet Mail program?
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday March 29 2021, @05:13AM
Since Windows 3.11 had networking (hence “for workgroups”), it would be strange if they removed that for Windows 95.
Note however that networking back then didn't automatically mean TCP/IP.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Monday March 29 2021, @11:53AM
The original Windows 95 did indeed include a TCP/IP stack, as well as print and file sharing. Peer-to-peer networking was actually one of it's big features.
Like most software of the time, the networking component and even individual protocols were optional. So you may not have seen it installed on some standalone computer.
The original 95 RTM release actually did not include "Internet mail", and sometimes even omitted the web browser. Microsoft originally wanted to promote Microsoft Exchange, and MSN instead.
The screen shot from the linked article appears to be from Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, which forcibly non-optionally bundled Internet Explorer 3 and Outlook Express (Internet Mail).
- Posted from Microsoft Windows 95
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @03:05AM (6 children)
I read about these Easter eggs, and I've got to say, at no company that I worked at would we even think of throwing in some superfluous junk like that. How did it make it into Microsoft code? Was there no peer review, just people coding and committing? The company culture (back then, anyway) seems to not place a high value on clean code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @03:27AM (3 children)
You don't remember the flight simulator that was embedded in Excel back in the 90s?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @08:00PM (2 children)
I sure do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @08:42PM (1 child)
Ok -- how about: You sure aren't very fun are you? If all you're worried about is code passing a peer review, and in saying so, lacking the context and being cognizant that sometimes, people will try to claim credit for the work they do while also trying to lighten up a soulless corporate entity's soul crushing efforts like what you are proposing is done...
it doesnt take a swot analysis to recognize that you aren't in the opportunities quadrant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @09:39PM
We simply respect our customer's machine resources (RAM, CPU) to not waste them. Also, the less extraneous stuff you put in, especially with regard to user input, the more secure the code will be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @03:57AM (1 child)
As someone who used the first edition of Win95A, I can safely say that code review and product testing must have been non-existent. The machine hung on boot if you didn't move the mouse within 10 seconds of reaching the desktop and it would reliably crash within a few hours* even if you did nothing else. Plug'n'Play screwing up ESCD settings also meant swapping video cards** every second or third boot when the machine would hang during POST. That one looked like motherboard failure and still existed as late as XP SP2 when it was reliably triggered by the MSN and AOL installers. AFAIK it still hasn't been fixed.
*The timer bug that reliably crashed the machine after 24 hours uptime wasn't discovered until Win95B since that was the first edition that could run that long. Daily reboot due to memory leaks was still strongly recommended as late as WinME.
**Required installing a different brand of video card in order to boot into Safe Mode so the windows drivers could be reset. The machine could then be powered off and the cards safely swapped back before restarting in normal mode. This was the only way to fix bad ESCD settings in those days. Modern BIOSes erase ESCD any time CMOS is cleared as a workaround.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday March 30 2021, @09:15AM
So that's why I couldn't get it to boot reliably! I wish I'd known about this back then.
Back then I used to say that Windows 95 only had three problems: it wouldn't boot, it wouldn't run, and it wouldn't shut down. (I'd seen it crash during startup, running, and shutting down.)
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday March 29 2021, @06:09AM
Win 95 is closed source hasn't been mainstream for almost 20+ years so it doesn't surprise me that something could stay hidden for this long.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."